The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Every Cloud has a silver bullet to kill the dreaded ITIL"

common sense about ITIL

skeptic — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:46:47 +0000

And common sense about ITIL, by "Tom13" in the comments on that Register article:
Implementing ITIL will magnify management: Good management will get better, bad management will get worse.
Brilliant

common sense about "ITIL and the Cloud"

skeptic — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:37:56 +0000

How nice to read some common sense about "ITIL and the Cloud", from The Register.
The headline sucks (clearly written by an editor not the author), but the article itself is measured and correct.

Common sense is even less common at cloud level than ground level.

Despatches from the front line: Cloud makes sod all difference

skeptic — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:33:00 +0000

A great comment on an HP blog (the post itself isn't great: it misinterprets Bob Lewis who I'm growing to like more and more)

We've just done a quite interesting exercise as part of the finalization of our Cloud Architecture. One of us looked at how much the ITIL processes would be affected by Cloud. In other words, we looked at which ITIL V3 processes would be functionally or technically different by cloud service and which ones would be based on common functionality across all services, cloud or not cloud. Out of the 27 level 2 processes, three are really differebnt (Capacity Management, Availability Management and Request Fulfillment), and 14 are substantially the same, the others are somewhere in the middle.

And of course given the principle of adopt-and-adapt, one simply adapts the processes to deal with more external providers covering more of the service than usual. No big deal. This B.S. about "ITIL and Cloud are incompatible" or "if the cloud is replacing everything, what do we need ITIL for?" really is infuriating.

Techs & their toys

Hazyitsm — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 01:34:44 +0000

The organizations that have not yet embraced service-based management may well see ITSM as dead. There's a lot of the "We waited out ITIL/ITSM and we're still alive! See!" These are the companies that never moved past IT being about infrastructure management and nothing else. They see, erroneously, that they get to play with cool tech toys in the cloud.

I think the sad truth is THAT type of organization IS dying, and they don't even know it yet. They think their job is now to corral the cloud into the IT pasture so it can get branded as being owned by IT. This is important John Wayne stuff that only we can handle. Don't worry your purdy little face about it.

What they are missing is that the rest of the business has no interest in the cloud being IT branded. The tools they want are just sitting there waiting to be used. IT only makes it more complicated by insisting on branding the free-range cattle that is the cloud. IT that insists upon managing the cloud "infrastructure" will become obsolete ... Or at least nothing more than corporate data plumber.

This is not a revolution; no more than actually hiring people whose entire job was to help staff use technology. Remember, that was pretty radical at one time.

So I see ITSM's future very differently. I see it as a critical piece of moving organizations forward. We may well see a temporary drop in ITSM activity as businesses think they can go it on their own, without IT. The good companies will see right away that managing information remains a business critical function, and they will continue to embrace good practices. Other organizations will struggle for a while before they see the need for some kind of data management. "Now how are all these cloud data sources going to talk to one another? You mean they don't just work? What we really need are people that just 'get' how all this information goes together. It's really too bad our old IT folks didn't see themselves in that role, because they'd be perfect for it now!"

the "Rules are Different" song

skeptic — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:49:00 +0000

Matthew, you're singing the "Rules are Different" song again. We're in a recession right now because the bankers convinced the Fed the rules were different, that they could magic away the risk.

Information and the technology it resides in - whoever owns it and wherever it is - must be managed. You can outsource much of the management but not all, and it must be governed by the owner, not by some bunch of geeks in Seattle.

Google promises 3-nines at the server. They promise nothing about the internet connectivity, the LAN or the desktop. So you'll never get near to 3-nines at the user. What if you need 4-nines eh?

And if Google are down for 9 minutes and 59 seconds, guess what? That doesn't count as an outage. Tell THAT to the users.

Oh and if the users have a question, who do they call please?

BTW, facebook isn't IT. It is media, entertainment, the new Hollywood. it has as much to do with business IT as my pile of CDs does. it is beer-and-circuses for the masses.

This "ITSM-is-dead" is pure crystalline essence of bullshit

Why Shoot the Messenger?

Glen — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:46:55 +0000

Matt, I agree the trainer could have been better, but it is a balancing act, the trainer is bound by the syllabus.
Apparently everyone passed, but according to my contact, not one of the 16 cared about ITIL.
So now I have been asked to do an overview on why ITIL matters.

Kill em All

Matt Hooper — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 18:19:20 +0000

ahhh... my first Metalica album 1983....

ITSM

Four words, Information Technology Service Management

At the end of the day business are built only on one of these. Information.
In fact Facebook has proven, you don't even need the other 3 and you can become a billionaire.

Smoke signals didn't work so well, so TECHNOLOGY has helped out.
Dependancy and criticality of the TECHNOLOGY raised, so SERVICE kicks in.
Complexity, interoperability, and cost threatened the value so MANAGEMENT is layered in there.

In case no one has noticed Facebook is a horrible tool. Yet this Cowboy Techie is on his way to make Bill Gates his caddie.

Does that mean we don't need rules? Of course not. As Skep says, Facebook is not the business model "Generally Accepted", but it's moving that way.

So to Glens, point. If it's about framework and not about outcomes, then we are useless in IT, and the more savvy businesses don't need us. Btw, Glen, that trainer should be fired.

I just finished reading IT Savvy by Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill. If IT pros are ticked off by what they heard on ITSMWP with Rodrigo, then how about what an MIT Sloane research in a series of well structured studies have to say on this topic. Check it out.

Btw, Seek and Destroy was my first song I learned by Metalica... searching.... Seek and Destroy

-Matt

generally accepted practice

skeptic — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:15:48 +0000

Agreed. ITIL changes slowly, about every seven years on past performance. COBIT 5 is coming out at the end of next year - it will be interesting to see if it has embraced any of this change.

In the meantime we are all learning and working it out, as you say. Few more so than Rodrigo who's right out there on the front edge of the wave.

"Best practice" or I prefer "generally accepted practice" is about what's proven. That takes time. Someone has to go there first and try it. In fact several have to try it so we can (nearly) all agree on what works.

But spouting bile and derision on the established frameworks because they are waiting to see what falls out is counter-productive. And expecting the business to drop everything and let the techs off the leash so they can find out what doesn't work at the business's expense is deluded. Cloud is experimental and will remain so until mainstream business can see how it is to be controlled in order to protect the organisation.

Those who have spoken to me recently know I'm thinking about how ITSM needs to adapt as much as anyone. We await the results of Cloud experiments to give us the evidence to make sensible decisions about that.

ITs About the Business and IT working together.

Glen — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:13:44 +0000

Couple of comments....

1) How are you going to manage the cloud without some kind of framework to manage the information and usage?
2) ITIL has always been about aligning what you do with business / organizational requirements.

In plain language, if you cannot show the enterprise you work in how your efforts add value to them, you are at risk.
A toolset that helps people express their ideas and concepts in a common language and approach. So we can speak the same language.
With a core objective of aligning what we deliver to what the organization needs. That is what ITIL and ITSM represent.

It gets frustrating to listen to how the core message is lost in translation. I am working with someone who just completed their foundation.... They called the course a complete waste of time.... But when I talked to them about alignment to busines, knowing and documenting core requirements, aligning SLA metrics to show they are moving towards what they promised, using incident, change and event management to manage and sustain the environment, and more...The response was where do I go to understand and use this.

Showed em the ITIL Service Operation book. Shock and horror....its in a book, the book is getting used and read. (sigh)

Cloud killer to me would be a chaotic organization trying to support their services without some basic guidance and discipline.

Well said

Matt Beran — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:56:18 +0000

The detail bit is why there isn't a lot of noise around lack of ITIL attention to 'cloud'.

1) How many people looking at the details of servicest are using/referencing ITIL?
2) How many cloud providers look at ITIL for details and adjust their products accordingly? (I hope none, just do it right).

The generations after us will laugh that this was game-changing (along with Hoop), Hoop's idea of supply chain for I.T. services is spot-on. Nothing is changing, just the tools to deliver the data. As you put it " it does nothing to remove the need for management of information and management of service", it's just that people want someone to tell them how to handle the "new complexities of supplier management, sovereignty of data, confidentiality, configuration and so on"

Some people are coming up with it on their own, some look to ITIL and don't see the correlation, and some see the correlation and adapt their models. Those people will continue to thrive.

Wow

ServiceSphere — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:36:00 +0000

Wow. Wow. Wow.

The only killer cloud is this one http://bit.ly/aYURCC

I had Rodrigo pegged wrong. He is just looking at our space the same way he did with Catalog.

The cloud danger here is the same danger with ITIL itself, plain and simple MARKETING FUD and promises.

Not because of anything killing ITSM, ITSM itself is just a means to an end.

I'm excited that we live in a time where we can see our own skill set demise and readjust.

You should be too.

Chris.