Chokey the Chimp is the public spokesman for The IT Skeptic's Crap Factoid Early Warning Service.

Chokey the Chimp hates crap factoids(pure B.S. that almost sound like a fact, and will be presented so often that everyone will think it true).

Please everybody look up "proprietary" in the dictionary and understand that ITIL is proprietary. I can't believe that every single ITIL vendor is illiterate, so I have to think they are spreading a Crap Factoid. And boy! how it is spreading!

Chokey the Chimp was happy we weren't seeing any CFs in May, but I knew something would come along, and I might have guessed EMA would oblige. I might also have guessed it would be CMDB-related.

We have an interesting discussion thread going on the suspension of critical faculties in the face of analyst research, and especially on the desire for it to be true. Cognitive dissonance and denial have been suggested as two causes. The IT Skeptic explores some ideas.

Yes cognitive dissonance and denial happen once they are in the drek. To get there involves other factors:

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The IT Skeptic's Crap Factoid Early Warning Service lists the following Crap Factoid as mild, so Chokey the Chimp is staying at "high" risk, but watch out you don't step in this one. Relatively harmless but still smells bad on your shoe.

Readers may think I'm exaggerating about the spread of crap factoids. Back at the end of 2006 we spotted the crap factoid "ITIL reduces costs by up to 48%". This one was particularly pernicious because it had the Gartner name behind it, which gives it a CF multiplier of 2. Where is it now? Let's see.

This is a podcast of the original article IT analysts produce crap - what to look for in analyst "research"

There are a couple of fundamental causes underlying the success of analyst crap factoids as memes [a meme is an idea that propogates through the species like a gene].

This post has been podcast
Crap Factoids are pure B.S. that almost sound like a fact, and will be presented so often that everyone will think it true. Let us look closer at a classic Crap Factoid where the results were deliberately skewed, then hyped up by marketing people, and the resulting Crap Factoid thrown to the winds like GM seed. It is time people called analysts to task for this stuff because we all suffer the consequences when decision makers fall for it.

The IT Skeptic's Crap Factoid Early Warning Service brings you this warning of extreme crap factoid danger.