TSO

The IT Skeptic was pretty scathing of Malcolm Fry's first ITIL V3 Complementary Publication, Building an ITIL-Based Service Management Department. Personally I wouldn't buy it (again). Malcolm's second "official" V3 book ITIL Lite is different. It is worth buying just for Chapter 2: "a simple but effective approach to ITIL process engineering". I got several great ideas from it and the overall methodology is a good one. But ITIL Lite has several fundamental assumptions that many will disagree with. These assumptions will mislead an already confused user community, and I think they spoil the rest of the book.

Fresh out of the pan today, the Scope and Development Plan: ITIL® V3 Update is released. (Thanks Liz for the tip!) I'm getting ready to leave for the Pink Elephant conference in Las Vegas (see you there! Come to my sessions, or see me in booth 203), so I may not get time to comment on this document. We all welcome your comments - leave them here.

Is a British Government website inaccurate or is APMG TSO operating without a license?

TSO has appointed the four "mentors" for the ITIL Refresh Refresh (thanks servicesphere)

All you budding ITIL authors, now is your chance.

ITIL V3, PRINCE2:2009 (The-Framework-Previously-Known-As-Prince2), ITIL V3 New Edition... and now M-o-R:2010 and MSP:2010. Yes, OGC are calling for authors for Management of Risk 2010 edition and Managing Successful Programmes 2010 edition. Go on! How hard can it be? But you better hurry...

TSO and APMG both maintain websites "on behalf of" OGC. TSO also maintains their own commercial site with a confusingly similar name to their "on behalf" one. Neither of them provide any user community- that is left to itSMF to do. Page ranks of pages are [corrected:] 6 or less, while for purposes of comparison the less popular ISACA quietly maintains a page rank 8. The Wikipedia entry is rubbish. ITIL's online brand presence is a dog's breakfast - ill-conceived and poorly executed.

Who now controls ITIL? Who sits atop this multi-billion-dollar empire and calls the shots? The real power behind ITIL is still fragmented, although one wonders for how long. The IT Swami predicts!

I see the price of TSO's ITIL Live™ has fallen even further, in fact halved AGAIN. Since the £495 per annum fee now includes ITIL V3 Lifecycle Suite content - i.e. you get an online subscription to the books included in the price (normally £265 p.a. ) - some readers may now judge it worth considering, especially if the boss is paying. Quite a cut from the original £2,500!

Readers may have missed the comment a while ago that the ITIL portal was originally going to be "available to the ITSM community at no cost".