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Get all the IT skeptical news that is fit to print ... and then some!

Here are some links that may be of use or interest to readers. [Updated 24/5/2010]

Articles by the IT Skeptic published elsewhere

The IT Skeptic's ITIL News Pipe

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Don't miss the ITSM Weekly podcast and other blog posts from the inimitable ServiceSphere (Chris Dancy) and the Matts-squared, Baren and Hooper.

I do like the common sense on Making ITIL Work

A suitably skeptical view of ITIL V3 certification from ITSM Manager (something of a tautology there)

I enjoy reading Aidan Lawes on ITP Report every week - he out-skepticks the Skeptic!

So too does Aale Roos on ITSM Portal.

James Finister has a great blog Core ITSM. Very useful thoughtful skeptical views on ITIL in particular and ITSM in general. I don't agree with everything he says, which is also a good sign. I see it having an idealogical connectioin with my own ideas of Core Practice: cut the crap, don't gild the lily, look for the key necessities.

David Ratcliffe, the Pink President, is deep in the world of ITIL but certainly not inside Castle ITIL. He doesn't post often. It is well worth reading.

Good skeptical stuff from Vinod Agrasala

dev2ops is an ITSM blog that is thoughtful, useful, knowledgeable, suitably skeptical, and NOT written to regurgitate basic ITIL descritpions or to advance the ego of the blogger

Platen is a blog by whose tagline is "where technology meets common sense". Floyd usually makes sense and he is always skeptical - my kind of blogger

A widely read thinker in the IT Management space, with a suitably skeptic bent, is John M Willis

An IT Skeptic has gotta love a website called IT Project Failures

I get great value from Terry Doerscher.

ITSM Portal is THE source of ITSM news, as well as great directories of tools, organisations, frameworks, and magazines..

I don't quite understand how someone so geeky can be so interesting but Michael Coté at Redmonk manages it, and with a suitable dash of skepticism too!

Mike Rothman's Daily Incite is skeptical, cynical and technical.

DITY newsletter combines skeptical and practical advice - excellent stuff.

ITSM View is an ITSM-related blog that certainly seems to be taking a critical look at things.

The Datamation forum sees less traffic than some but is less up itself. But then I write for them so what do I know?

Doug McClure: A nicely wide-ranging blog

Charles Betz's ERP approach to IT: a concept gaining traction

Andrew Kramer comes at ITIL from the technical NSM perspective

Rodrigo Fernando Flores does a nice line of common sense, backed up by solid experience. Lots of good Service Catalogue resources here too.

If you read German... Even if you don't, use the Google translator and you can usually work it out. It is worth the effort. I have got some great info from this site.

..and for the Spanish speakers amongst you: Antonio Valle's "Gobierno de las TIC. Conocimiento Adquirido".

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Not necessarily ITIL but sites the Skeptic likes...

The IT Skeptic recommends BullFighter for anyone who writes anything in English

Gullibility: a suitably skeptical blog

Somehow CalvinBall seems so relevant.

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Sites that solicit and/or provide open content on ITIL:

Wikipedia

Open ITIL

The ITIL Open Guide isn't actually that open - try contributing. It also has a worldwide register of ITIL certified people

The ITIL Wiki

The ITIL Process Wiki

You can buy all of my books in print now from Amazon.com, as an alternative to Lulu. Digital versions are still only from Lulu.

Yes I know I said The IT Skeptic Looks at CMDB would never be sold through Amazon, but apparently I fliipped the wrong bit and it is there so I am leaving it there although I make very little.

For all books, I'm struggling to get the feed to work into Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.jp etc Sorry, I'll keep on it for you. In the meantime Lulu provides best shipping options for many countries.

By all reports I'm getting, people enjoy these books and find them useful. I hope you will too.

A must-read for everyone who owns, approves, proposes or manages an ITIL project.

My favourite of these books: inspiration and ideas to make am difference in your own and other peoples' IT careers.

"Do your worst", so I did. My selection fo all the content from this blog worth taking on holiday with you for a relaxing, amusing and yet stimulating read.

There aren't many funny ITSM books. According to all the reader feedback this one is. A satire on ITIL, ITSM and IT operations in general.

A controversial book this one, arguing that CMDB is an unjustifiable diversion from improving configuration management process.

The IT Skeptic was privileged to be the guest on the latest IT Management & Cloud podcast with co-hosts Michael Coté (you gotta love someone with a blog called People Over Process and the tagline "One foot in the muck, the other in utopia") and John M Willis (you also gotta love someone who sings nearly as badly as Neil Young*).

I think it went rather well despite Astro chewing my sleeve through much of it: we covered CMDB - of course - in quite a lot of depth, not surprising since that its the part of ITIL that intrudes most into Michael's and John's worlds, but we also covered Change, Castle ITIL, the Cloud, my books, and Kiwi accents. There's a comment at the bottom of the page where I fixed the blooper I made during the interview. If you don't want to listen to me, listen to the first part with John's song "IT Revolution".

*There's an allusion there to the preface to my book Introduction to Real ITSM

Here is a presentation given to the New Zealand Computer Society on 25th June 2009, on the topic of "Owning ITIL". it covers why ITIL is pretty much always a project, what to watch out for in ITIL projects (ITIL the Cult, ITIl the fad, CMDB can't be done...), what to expect from ITIL.

If you ever wondered "what does this nut look like in the flesh?" now is your chance. First time ever, an exclusive video interview with the IT Skeptic by Christopher Dancy of ServiceSphere. To protect delicate sensibilities the interview is in two parts. We cover a wide range of ITSM topics from ITIL projects to incident taxonomies to the satire of Real ITSM, with an earthquake thrown in for free. I hope you enjoy it and of course always welcome feedback.

This article has been podcast

At the US Pink Elephant conference, Sharon Taylor, the Chief Architect and Chief Examiner of ITIL, listed five common myths about ITIL V3. I thought I'd make it clear that none of them came from this blog.

Update: sadly, these videos have gone from YouTube
Personally I find learning from online videos even harder than learning from online webpages ("ooh look an incoming email..."), but for those of you who can stomach death-by-video this might be a good option for you to study free for your ITIL V3 Foundation course. This post has compiled and sorted a bunch of videos created by Marco Cattaneo and alerted me to the set, but you can also access them on Marco's own playlist on YouTube.

Wired magazine seems to think the internet heralds a new socialism. This silliness stems from the same hypocricy and self-delusion that has middle class kids sitting in a house someone else built wearing clothes someone else cast off and lusting after DVDs and cell phones, while pretending to plot the downfall of Western capitalism. The internet is perhaps the greatest creation of capitalism. It is only through the surpluses generated by its money engine and the freedom generated by its armies that twaddle such as this even gets written and read.

[Update: Late 2010 and Acend are still at it. No ethics.]

Many of us break the law. I drive too fast. Years ago I smoked some things, and I inhaled. And ...er... so on. But when someone does something that they are supposed to be defending against, it doubly stings: crooked cops, killer doctors, dangerous pilots, ambulances that crash... (stupid educators - oops a favourite theme but off topic). What are we to make of a company whose livelihood is their intellectual property, who then set out to systematically rip off the property of others, and blatantly too? But that is what Acend Corporate Learning of Toronto appears to have done. They should know better.

Worldwide there is an overall IT professional accreditation spreading, in the UK (CITP), Europe, the USA, Australia and other places. Not before time.
For too long IT managers have accepted poor documentation, subverted change control and general ill-discipline from IT technical staff simply because they held the sacred knowledge about the technology under their care.
The understanding is emerging that the long-term health of IT depends more on professional behaviour: good process, good data, good record-keeping… a good culture amongst the staff. There is less patience with the prima-donnas and the cowboys.

A recent blog set me thinking. Since OGC have now set a standard for assessing software products against ITIL processes, that should also form the basis of ITIL maturity assessment too. All we await is OGC publishing the standard. I bet they don't.

Does a cloud computing infrastructure obviate the need for IT Service Management systems? The IT Skeptic thinks not.

Memo

To: the ITIL qualifications/certifications/training industry

From: we the unrepresented punters paying for this circus, a.k.a. candidates

Subject: one more pissed off customer

The analysts can beat the drums all they like - they won't make the CMDB dead elephant dance [I'm in training for the World Mixed-Metaphor Championship]. I've talked before about how the analysts are in a symbiotic relationship with the vendor industry: they have to talk new ideas up so as to have some change to write about. Never has this been more clearly illustrated than around CMDB. For one wonderful moment I thought an analyst was going to be skeptical about CMDB but then he beat the drum, or perhaps flogged the dead elephant [there I got another one in!]

It lurks in the corner of many data centres these days. Actually, no, it used to lurk in the corner. Now it lurks on a virtual server. If it don't start we're screwed. What is it?

[Updated 18th July - I got it wrong]

The IT Skeptic got all excited about Microsoft's announcement in September last year that they were releasing MOF under a Creative Commons license.

After three years of this blog there's someone I should thank: the folk at WestHost who have kept it running almost without a hitch all that time. I've run this blog on virtual servers and real ones, all hosted in Utah by the nice WestHost folk. The service has been impeccable, from real live humans who are invariably polite, patient, responsive and helpful. There are slightly cheaper deals out there but not much and with a lot more unhappy customers on the forums: I think WestHost is a great deal. We've had a couple of glitches over the the years, only one of which was their fault as we moved from one server to another and the domain didn't come along. They jumped to fix them both times. The rest of the time it has chugged quietly away, the technology upgrading from time to time, backups backing up and servers serving. I'm a very happy customer.

In Killing the Goose: The Commercialization of ITIL, David Mainville joins the crowded field of ITIL skeptics. I agree with the phenomenon he is seeing, the over-commercialisation of ITIL, but I don't think I agree about it causing complexity, or that the complexity is wrong.

Through all the talk about the wonderful benefits of a CMDB, nobody mentions the additional drag a CMDB puts on all change to the IT environment.

Since the release of ITIL version 3 (v3) there is much “Ding! Dong! The Process is dead!” but I don’t think so. There is a burgeoning market for third-party process charts for v3. Authors are interpreting the new “v3-speak” back into the process-centric frame of reference where most users are still comfortable. We just got over the wrench away from techno-centric towards process-centric with ITIL Version 2 (v2). Many people aren’t ready for service-centric yet.

Should ITIL certification exam multiple-choice questions test one's knowledge of the holy writ of the ITIL books or one's knowledge of the principles of ITIL or one's skills in mental manipulation and logic? I'm told by someone with photographic memory that one of the ITIL Foundation exam questions looks something like the following, which is quite similar to a sample question we discussed before.

I'm always banging on about how COBIT is a superset of ITIL. So where does ITIL Knowledge Management fit in COBIT? I don't think of it as Configuration Management even if some of the documents are CIs: KM is a much higher discipline than that. Is this one aspect of ITIL that COBIT doesn't address?

Further to our discussion around the real cost of ITIL certification, readers are reminded that there still exists a fast track to Expert status that is quicker and cheaper. It still isn't that quick or cheap, but it is better than the primary path. And it won't be around for long. The ITIL Qualifications Board's latest survey shows them bunching muscles, gathering themselves for the final spring, to kill off ITIL V2 certification once and for all. (For pity's sake, have your say to try and make that as hard as possible for them). In the meantime there is another way

Can anyone who was at the Gartner conference this week confirm what I saw on Twitter? "Major takeaway from Gartner IOM event is less than 5% of fortune 2000 have an active CMDB installed "

A forum post on LinkedIn asked us what will IT be like in 2011? I checked the police website and found the IT Swami was last seen in Hokitika, poaching paua (abalone) for the Chinese market. After a close shave while diving under the influence he appears to have seen the light on stripping our birthright to supply Asian greed through Kiwi greed. I finally found him building a gypsy house-truck that included a local area network, UPS and satellite link. I got up early enough in the morning to catch him sober (as he wasn't awake yet) and quickly recorded his predictions while he fumbled for his cigarettes:

The word on the street is that they are! One training provider's blog suggested that since the latest revision of the syllabus perhaps "the exam was quite different from the course materials and the sample exam".

A reader had a quiet word with us about the relative costs of itSMF conferences, and we discovered on investigation that there is a most extraordinary diversity of cost around the world. Each itSMF chapter is constitutionally obliged to hold a chapter conference, but boy do they have a range of pricing for them. Aussies should have come to our conference in NZ- you'd have got a holiday in lovely Wellington, along with Sharon Taylor, Ivor MacFarlane, Rob Stroud, your prez, and others, and probably still had change left. And how about the Netherlands? Free to members! That's how you drive membership.

Forums are often full of total newbies trying to find out, and only slightly-less-newbies answering their questions. I know blogs like The IT SKeptic are nearly as dangerous for their self-appointed-expert status, but at least you have Google page-rank as some indicator of how others view the site. On a forum it is hard to evaluate what a poster knows unless you already know the answer to the question. Look at this example

Unemployed skeptics have too much time to ponder things. As I lay sprawled on the footpath outside the labour exchange in the sun, it occured to me that although we are stuck with the word "incident" for historical reasons, there must be a better word for it.

Two excellent publications recently commented on what I call terminological debasement of the term "governance".

There is a quite amazing new statistic: information increases by 66% per annum, faster than any other artifact of the human race. Here I was thinking I was just getting slower at coping with it all, but indeed I am drowning in an exponentially increasing flow. What about you? How do you deal with it? It is exponential: how much harder has it become in the last two years?

Continuing our philosophising over Incidents, the service management group down at the employment centre were wondering about Complaints and Incidents.

In true camels/committees fashion, the ITIL V3 certification scheme is arcanely complex, as it twists itself into knots to please everyone. Then Pink Elephant come along and make it all seem simple.

Here is a superb website on data visualisation. I heard about this site from Riitta Raesmaa on Twitter. What really hit me were the images of the internet and the blogosphere. My favourite site is Aharef. The static graphs of websites are fascinating, but the real whammy comes when you watch it generate an image of a site, such as this one.

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!

TSO and APMG both maintain websites "on behalf of" OGC. TSO also maintains their own commercial site with a confusingly similar name to their "on behalf" one. Neither of them provide any user community- that is left to itSMF to do. Page ranks of pages are [corrected:] 6 or less, while for purposes of comparison the less popular ISACA quietly maintains a page rank 8. The Wikipedia entry is rubbish. ITIL's online brand presence is a dog's breakfast - ill-conceived and poorly executed.

The IT Skeptic's book Owning ITIL® is now available on the "other" Amazon sites such as Amazon.co.uk. It has been available for some time on Amazon.com. Essential reading for everyone planning, proposing, owning or approving Service Management projects!

Documents leaked recently to the press revealing plans for an official standard for the certification of ITIL compliance in software products by the British Government agency OGC have seen that agency defending the proposal to a committee of angry vendors today.

I've been called to task a few times for my anti-Americanism. Australasians are rudest to their friends. The USA's Memorial Day would seem to be a good one to acknowledge the debt I - we - owe to the USA.

Apparently CA are working to an entirely different standard for CMDB Federation than the rest of us are. This is the only rational conclusion to be drawn from a recent white paper from them. Either that or they are shovelling the bull excrement at a remarkable rate. The paper is called "The Value of Standards-based CMDB Federation". CA are certainly extracting more value out of the standard than most of us.

[A couple of years ago the IT Skeptic wrote of my first impressions of the ITIL V3 five core books. That article is no longer available online, so I have revised it and reprinted it here]

As discussed in my review of the Service Strategy book, it will take considerable time to really digest these books and their implications, and to test the chisel of theory against the cold hard rock of reality (none more so than that Service Strategy book).

But first impressions can be drawn now and they are good ones.

The IT Skeptic is all for capitalism. I welcome people making a buck on the internet. Unfortunately as we have seen previously Wikipedia doesn't, and commerically orented sites are drummed out (unless they are magazine sites with ads, or a big vendor's white papers, or a number of other inexplicable exceptions). So what's with these two ITIL sites?

[Updated May 2009] The CMDB Federation standards initiative must be the most over-hyped vendor marketing smokescreen ever. Whenever anyone raises the bogeyman of proprietary CMDBs, the vendors wheel this one out as the future promise of interoperability. It is pure vendor double-talk. It solves little and is taking forever to appear anyway. It solves little because the standard defines only how management tools can pass data between them- nothiong about what they pass. I bet the much-trumpeted demos seen so far involved data massaging and informal backroom agreements beyond that dictated by the standard in order to get it all to work. I am highly skeptical (surpise!) about the likelihood that this standard would enable or even faciltiate anything useful in a real-world implementation.

Congratulations to the IT Skeptic on three years of blogging. I've been invited to write a few words on this occasion.

I did some work a while ago on SM in SMEs (that's Service Management in Small to Medium Enterprises of course: SMISME? SM4SME [the one I use]? SMESM?). When seen through the distorting lens of SME priorities, frameworks like ITIL look pretty different. Every 70s deadbeat like this writer knew that you can learn by tripping out, so it is enlightening for us to look at ITIL in REALLY small organisations. I wrote an article about it but the website is no longer available so here is the article:

The word “service” certainly gets some exercise. ITIL v3 says “A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve, but without the ownership of specific costs and risks.”

This impenetrable bit of consultant-babble does not help those who are trying to grasp the fundamental concept.