V3

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.

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

APMG have annnounced the ITIL Master certification.

Today we have a guest post from Peter Gerritsen who has written a letter to the ITIL Qualifications Board proposing some changes to the ITIL V3 qualifications scheme. I told him he has a snowflake's chance in Hell given what they went through to get the scheme to this point (I have plenty of experience of hammering on the doors of Castle ITIL). We are interested in your views:

All you budding ITIL authors, now is your chance.

Being a simple soul with only a limited grasp of ITIL, sometimes I'm sure I've missed something obvious. Like when I went looking in the Service Strategy book to find where the overall business plan or organisational strategy informs the service strategy. If IT is your business, if you are an IT service provider company, then I can see SS working. But for an internal service provider, for an IT department, SS reads as if service strategy is developed in isolation from the rest of the organisation, as if we treat the rest of the organisation as a remote customer of services instead of as the same team, from whom we take direction. At what point in SS do we ask the Board? At what point does the corporate executive inject policy? Where do we align with the business strategy? Or did I miss something?

A hundred users call up and say they can't get emails. One incident or 100?

Fundamental and simple question. Go check ITIL for the answer. I'll wait.

In my recent article on ITSMWatch, I hammer once again on the great doors of Castle ITIL, right next to the faint marks from when I did so last time. ITIL needs to open up to the huge community it has created.

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.

If you are thinking the ITIL V3 2nd Edition or Refreshrefresh - or whatever it is called - is just about adding a few missing semicolons and spelling Ivor Macfarlane's name right, think again. Even if they get talked out of this plan to rewrite (read: dumb down) the whole of Service Strategy ("oooh ITIL is HARD - why can't it be easy like TV?"), take a look at some of the errors to be fixed in the books. Remember, paid authors for each book from major corporations, hundreds of reviewers, professional commercial publisher with professional editors... and we get: