CobiT

It is always illuminating to use COBIT as a benchmark to study ITIL. In recent days, ISACA has announced another solid Board, whilst itSMF continues its infighting (see below), APMG expands its empire, TSO goes its own merry way unanswerable, and OGC tightens control over - and profit from - what everyone thought was public property (blog coming if I can ever unravel it all).

COBIT5 is coming along. The first(?) development workshop is over and the next is in August, not far away! For those of you who haven't got your head around the next generation of COBIT, you need to. I grow weary reiterating that COBIT is not for auditors. COBIT is good for management, governance-enablement, design, assessment... and audit. It is marching into ITIL's space with superior fire power. So wake up.

When I presented my "layman's view of COBIT" to the local chapter of itSMF some time back, the main point I wanted to make was that COBIT has many practical uses - only one of them is audit. This is reflected in the changing makeup of the ISACA membership: auditors are now a minority.

ISACA have published a draft design document of COBIT 5 for your comment. If you have an interest in IT management, ITSM or governance you should read it and provide feedback. Here's what I will be saying. What about you?

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