The ITIL world descends into farce

The IT Swami predicts the next itSMF AGM will involve Board members coming and going through doors on both sides of the stage, occasionally in disguise and at least one in drag.

It is a little speculative, but I suspect what they are up to is to keep the governance farce going long enough that people like me will give up writing about it. It is a good strategy - I'm just about over it.

There can be few other explanations for the following chronicle from the latest Skeptical Informer newsletter:

• the Institute of Service Management doing battle with Ian Clayton's IT Service Management Institute over USA trademark
• itSMFI flogging off deep discounts at the expense of local chapters to try to keep global members (read; big sponsors)
• A distinctly British government approach to consultation for ITIL3
• Microsoft trying to patent the obvious in CMDB
• backstabbing and pricing shennanigans between supposed partners in ITIL the moment the ITIL3 books actually went on sale
• the itSMF USA election saga with the mysterious vanishing Julie Linden
• itSMF USA's hasty exit of their executive director, James Prunty
• the US DoJ sniffing around the ITIL industry
• itSMFI's insistence on secret governance rules and cursory public financial accounting
• itSMFI's hasty and limited call for nominations for the new Board
• itSMFI declining a significant proportion of nominations for the new Board on what some would perceive to be a technicality
• the election results are then rushed out ahead of the planned announcement at the AGM
• the ITIL3 certification program, syllabi and exams degenerate to something close to fiasco under a barrage of criticism and complaints
• the ITIL certification owners lose their own accreditation from the UK government auditors
• Ivor Macfarlane elected Chair of IPESC when arguably not even a member of IPESC, just an invited representative from itSMFI. This one is questionable enough that rumour has it even some of the incoming Board object.

No sooner had the Skeptical Informer gone to press than:

• Sharon Taylor's title as Board Chair mysteriously disappears. There is no explanation at all on the website but enquiries reveal that the full Board - i.e. all the chapter reps from around the world - decided they wanted the Executive Board to elect its own Chair and that the existing Board had no mandate to run the presidential-style election for Chair already executed.
• The Board calls for nomination for election of a seventh Board member - again without explanation ("never apologise, never explain", or is it "let them eat cake"?). Again the IT Skeptic goes enquiring. The explanation is innocuous: There already "was a co-opted, non voting directorship covering Chapter Services. The 'new' position is really a formalisation of that post [which could not be called for] during the original nomination, as it was not then a formal position." So why not tell the world that so there is some semblance that we know what we are doing?
• So far not so bad but then the new incoming Board, before they have taken up their new positions and before the seventh Board member is even nominated let alone elected, decides in its wisdom to hold a hasty vote for Chair and elects Sharon Taylor back into the position she vacated some days earlier.
• itSMFI finally lifts a moritorium on publication of its own investment venture, the Van Haren ITSM books, imposed because it seemingly hadn't occured to anyone that buying the books might be seen as competition by their already contracted partner TSO.

About all we haven't seen yet is someone cross-dressing in order to meet their loved one's parents, and a custard pie being thrown.

And remember: this is only the stuff I dare tell you about! OK itSMFI, I surrender. If you stop doing it I'll stop writing about it.

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