compliance

Nobody could ever accuse Ken Turbitt of being backward about coming forward. Ken, you may recall, is owner of SMCG and the author of OGC's secret ITIL process software compliance "standard". Yesterday Ken said "Axios, and Service-Now have not been brave enough" to seek certification, which set off a small storm of response.

If there is the slightest shred of governance left in Castle ITIL one would hope they'll be telling Ken to pull his head in, so we reproduce the quote in full here - and some of the responses - before it disappears.

As I have said before, probably the biggest gun in the ITSM skepticking field right now is Aidan Lawes. Once again he has turned the flamethrower onto the ITIL Software Scheme, with a blistering post on his blog: "people with vested interests increasingly seem to find a ready platform for their propaganda... The software assessment service springs to mind as a prime example. Purported to be launched in the interest of the procurer, it seems to be much more in the interests of the small group (OGC, APMG and SMCG) involved in its secretive development." I'll let you read it there. Apart from agreeing with Aidan that a standard that is secret is lunacy (the kind of lunacy that only the British could invent), I'd like to pick up on some points that Aidan didn't address.

[Update: For the record, the IT Skeptic does not believe that there is anything illegal or dishonest about the ITIL Software Scheme. I do allege that it has been conducted in a manner that is inept, naive, unnecessarily secretive and without proper consideration for most of the stakeholders. It seems to me to be about as far from best practice in setting standards as one can imagine.]

A recent blog set me thinking. Since OGC have now set a standard for assessing software products against ITIL processes, that should also form the basis of ITIL maturity assessment too. All we await is OGC publishing the standard. I bet they don't.

[Updated 7th May: see below]

It's true folks.

BMC announce:

BMC Software [NYSE: BMC] has been awarded the first “ITIL® Process Compliant” certification and trademark, achieving this important milestone ahead of any of its competitors

[Updated 6 May to use correct link] It has arrived. As previously disclosed, the OGC has appointed APMG to administer a scheme to assure ITIL compliance of software.

Documents leaked recently to the press revealing plans for an official standard for the certification of ITIL compliance in software products by the British Government agency OGC have seen that agency defending the proposal to a committee of angry vendors today.

News continues to leak about an ITIL Software Endorsement Scheme endorsed by OGC, administered by APMG, and created and assessed by a small organisation SMCG. Without any public discussion at all, a "standard" for ITIL software products is about to be dropped on the unsuspecting ITIL public.

Many people argue that there is no such thing as ITIL compliance because there is no exact standard to audit against. Perhaps it is all semantics but I don't take such an absolute position - it seems to me that it ought to be measurable or at least assessable in some way. On the other hand I think the opposite statement is clearly true: There is no such thing as ITIL NON-compliant software tools.

[updated: it seems salient to revisit this post. To the vendor who proudly declared on this blog that your product is "ITIL aligned" you might like to measure that "alignment" against this list. ("Aligned" is the new slippery-speak now that "compliant" is on the nose)]

The IT Skeptic’s ITIL Compliance Alignment Criteria

[Update June 2009: This article has a poignant irony to it, now that OGC have unilaterally decreed that ITIL is, after all, a standard that one can certify compliance against]