cult

ITIL: Don't shoot the message

skeptic — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:26:32 -0700

It seems to me that ITIL is often very badly done (zealous, anal, officious, misdirected, overblown, dogmatic, theoretical, detached...), and people's bad experience results in them blaming ITIL itself. I've recently seen the effect of ITIL on a neophyte and it was positive and enriching: new awareness, new models to help solve challenges, hope for order in the chaos, a resource to help.

I point the finger at book-carrying door-to-door consultants, hype-merchant analysts generating their own industry, and tub-thumping vendors selling out-of-the-box snake-oil to the credulous (yes they share the blame). Don't shoot the message, shoot the inept messengers. Discuss.

Process maturity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for improving service.

skeptic — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:15:14 -0700

Yesterday we looked at how CMM-type maturity is not a measure of how well you are delivering service. CMM only measures sophistication of management, and actually only sophistication of empirical management. The corollary is that maturity assessments are not a measure of whether an improvement exercise was successful, not if the objective was to improve quality of service.

But wait! there's more! Mature management-by-numbers of process is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for improving service.

The cure for the common cult of "ITIL by the book"

skeptic — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 19:17:45 -0600

What a great line: "the cure for the common cult". Oooh, I wish I had thought of that, but I didn't. It comes from a recent article by Brian Johnson, one of the original authors of ITIL and an occasional contributor of comments on this blog.

The march of ITIL zealots

skeptic — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:24:17 -0600

Today let's look closer at the recent survey I quoted previously. We will discuss the lack of decent empirical evidence for ITIL in a subsequent blog. Vendor surveys are a poor substitute (I know, I worked for one), but when they are all we have then we should at least listen to them.

Sadly I don't think I can include Evergreen in my Circle of ITIL Skeptics, but they undoubtedly take a mature and rational approach to ITIL:

Which industry standards are relevant to my organization and which are redundant?
How do I get started?

read more

ITIL the cult

skeptic — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 19:13:19 -0600

This article has been podcast

We have seen that the ITIL movement has distinct overtones of a fad. What about a cult? A group that defines its own measure of good and bad by comparing against its own internal reference books then declares that those books hold the key to getting from bad to good sounds mighty like a cult to me.

A colleague gave me a model that I shall call the Skeptical Maturity Model for Technology Adoption. It has four phases

ITIL the fad

skeptic — Sat, 27 May 2006 18:55:50 -0600

One of the big dangers ITIL faces is being taken for a fad due to the wild enthusiasms it is generating. OK the word “wild” hardly applies to service management professionals but you know what I mean. Hopefully forums like this one can restore some decorum.

Fads in IT

skeptic — Sun, 21 May 2006 04:10:58 -0600

The IT industry is certainly prone to its fads. This is a reflection of the immaturity of the whole industry (as compared to say most branches of engineering. You don’t see civil engineers coming up with cool new ways to build bridges every few years, especially not cool new ways that turn out to be more expensive and less safe than traditional techniques).

Is ITIL another Y2K?

skeptic — Wed, 17 May 2006 04:16:57 -0600

[This article has been podcast]

There certainly are some strong similarities.