ITIL

The IT Infrastructure Library

How to contribute to ITIL

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2006-10-28 19:50

You have several easy options to choose from:
1. Be an author. Wait 3-5 years for the next ITIL Refresh. Tender for one of the books. Be one of about a dozen people worldwide to win a tender. Devote a year of your life to writing a book.
2. Know an author. Get networking now: you have 3-5 years to guess who the next ones will be and get into their professional circle. Then persuade them your idea is better than theirs.
3. Contact OGC to tell them you have some content to contribute. There is no documented process to do this, not any advertised contact point, but OGC are British government bureaucrats so you should find them helpful and communicative if you just send stuff off to any old address you can find. Once you have their attention, they will put you in touch with the next authors. See 2 above.
4. Forget it.

ITIL is culturally biased by its narrow and closed contributor base

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2006-10-27 04:32

ITIL is written by “service suppliers, training companies and academia in Britain, Canada and the USA” who know IT operations and cater to corporate business. That is a narrow authorship base for a framework that sets out to document IT Service Management. No authors from Asia. No authors from government, health, engineering, non-profits, or small business. And zero mechanisms for the disenfranchised to contribute. So how does anyone know it is universal best practice, and is it best for those other users?

ITIL is far from comprehensive

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2006-10-24 05:57

ITIL certainly does not cover all aspects of "IT Infrastructure" as the name suggests. It does not even cover all aspects of an IT Service Management Library, which would be a more accurate name for its scope. For a framework that pays much lip service to the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, it is light on with any part of that cycle except "Do".

ITIL in Asia

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2006-10-13 21:55

The IT Skeptic is writing for ITSMWatch now. A recent discussion in that forum led to the IT Skeptic expressing opinions on ITIL in Asia:

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

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2006-08-28 01:17

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 key to living without CMDB is process maturity level

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2006-08-25 01:39

This article has been podcast

Yes you can do without CMDB, so long as you are aiming at not too high a maturity level, say 3. The trick is to remember that you don't adopt a process, you improve it. If we aspire to a moderate level of maturity, then yes we can do without a CMDB. Plenty of people do.

The software analyst industry needs a code of practice.

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2006-08-17 22:52

This article has been podcast

In my country, the broadcast industry and the advertising industry both adhere to a voluntary code of practice to police the more extreme behaviours of their members. I wish the software vendor industry and their parasitic analysts would do the same.

Don't fall for the demo: an asset database with bells and whistles is not a CMDB

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2006-08-13 22:09

This article has been podcast

Don't fall for the demo: anyone can set up an asset database with enough relationship bells and whistles on it to fool themselves and others that they have a CMDB.

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