CobiT

Service management is IT. It is a way of describing how to do IT - all of it. When it comes to the scope of service management in general and ITIL in particular, the IT Skeptic has had a change of mind. In the past I accused ITIL V3 of having aspirations beyond its station, of trying to take on areas where it has no business going, such as strategy, applications and security. I don't think so any more: now I just think ITIL did it half-heartedly, too anaemically to be taken seriously by areas of IT outside of IT Operations. But Service Management definitely should go there.

The more I think about it the more convinced I become that the way ITIL and COBIT and ISO20000 structure incident and request fails the basic test of being customer-focused or business-aligned.

Along the way, I've somehow never got around to discussing a very important paper: Aligning COBIT® 4.1, ITIL® V3 and ISO/IEC 27002 for Business Benefit. This is one of the official OGC Alignment White Paper Series that do the alignment between ITIL V3 and the other frameworks, that ITIL V3 should have done in the first place.

ISACA have announced the members of their COBIT 5 taskforce, to develop the next generation COBIT.

From time to time, a consultant is in the position of explaining and justifying fundamentals. Recently I was describing how incidents are not the same thing as calls, that every call is not a new incident if the same user has already called about the same incident previously, that it is more effective to record the call history on the same incident. I went to three sources of "best practice" for support - there isn't any.

This is a video (and synchronised powerpoint) of a presentation by the IT Skeptic given to itSMFnz Wellington chapter on "the COBIT Body of Knowledge - a layman's view". 42 minutes, no download required.
Using COBIT as the framework for ITSM, ITIL shouldn’t be centre of the universe: COBIT as more than just an Audit Tool

I'm always banging on about how COBIT is a superset of ITIL. So where does ITIL Knowledge Management fit in COBIT? I don't think of it as Configuration Management even if some of the documents are CIs: KM is a much higher discipline than that. Is this one aspect of ITIL that COBIT doesn't address?

[Updated 18th September 2009, wrong ISO20000 book] With seemingly everyone gouging the ITIL user these days, is there an alternative for those of us who can't just (or just can't) get the boss to pay the exorbitant prices? You bet.

In my post about the control of ITIL the IT Swami conjectured that the future might hold ISACA gaining control of ITIL and possibly merging with itSMF. If that does not happen, it is pretty clear from ISACA's newly announced strategy that they are going to end up competing at least on the boundaries of their respective turfs and possibly over a large overlapping area.

The loooong awaited COBIT User Guide for Service Managers is now available. As an ISACA member I just downloaded my free copy (imagine itSMF members downloading free copies of core or complementary ITIL books - ow! my brain hurts) . The rest of you rabble can buy it (ebook here). I reviewed this book so I have some insight into what its impact will be. I believe this book rounds out COBIT as a concise body of ITSM knowledge that presents a credible alternative to ITIL. Not as deep in the detail, certainly not as wordy, but broader, more complete, more structured, systematic and consistent, not (yet) as mercenary and captive of vendors, and cheaper (using downloads). Don't ask me to pick between COBIT and USMBOK (yet), there are pros and cons of both. But I'm using them in preference over ITIL any time a client hasn't drunk the KoolAid.