ISACA

With a new itSMF Board meeting as we speak, perhaps it is salient to review what we got in 2009 as members of itSMF and ISACA, two similar-sized organisations with supposedly similar functions and similar annual membership fees. I've written before about how the two are chalk and cheese, and that remains true.

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.

I've blogged before about how ISACA and itSMF are chalk and cheese and how this shouldn't be so - we could be brothers. I'm reminded of this again with ISACA's Invitation to Participate. itSMF members read it and weep.

[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.

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!

Delivery date for the COBIT User's Guide for Service Managers has slipped to "first quarter of 2009". (You may recall the IT Skeptic suggested this book will "put a cat amongst the ITIL pigeons").

The long awaited ITIL V3 - COBIT V4.1 mapping white paper is available ... for a price. This is the final paper in a long-awaited series that answer the question left unanswered by the ITIL V3 books - how does ITIL relate to the standards and frameworks around it? The answer is that ITIL is very much a subset of COBIT's more comprehensive coverage.

itSMF exists as a marketing arm of the ITSM industry, by definition. An open market is a wonderfully self-levelling system: money flows where the potential money is. So itSMF forms a very good indicator of where the interest or 'action' is in ITSM at the time. Right now it is ITIL. But what about the future?