The IT Skeptic is pleased to announce our annual New Year's awards, inaugurated last year. These awards are presented to deserving figures and organisations in the IT industry in general and the ITSM industry in particular.
If you missed this month's edition of the Skeptical Informer, you missed some scuttlebutt about why the itSMF International website has hastily gone off the air. The circus continues - all part of an endless litany of mis-management, spats, dodgy deals and mis-governance through 2007.
By way of contrast, it is interesting to reflect that in the past two months ISACA has, for me personally as a member, done the following:
Multiple-choice exams test how well someone can do multiple-choice exams. Depending on how well written the qustions are, they might also test some understanding of the topic ... or not. With good technique you can get a pretty good score with limited knowledge
A podcast of the original post
How does IT Operations get control of "the other half"? How do we stop them chucking dead cats over the wall for us to own? It is pretty straightforward.
An extra-long 28-minute podcast of the series of posts on Big Uncle
Big Uncle is a name for the concept of “benevolent security”. Privacy is a dated concept, disappearing fast. People get all tied in a knot over this, but the consequences are only as bad as we let them be. Like any technology, there will be evil applications and there will be good ones. There are upsides which the IT Skeptic investigates.
A podcast of the original postITIL V3: where's the portal?
Long ago in a time far away, OGC promised an ITIL Live™ Portal to augment the impending new ITIL V3. "It's coming..."
A podcast of the original article itSMFUSA declares who it thinks was Julie Linden
So itSMFUSA believes James Prunty is Julie Linden. I look forward to seeing the outcome of this suit as I would love to know the truth of this. Whether a lawsuit will ever reveal the truth is another question.
This is a CATEGORY 1 Crap Factoid alert from Chokey the Chimp at the IT Skeptic's Crap Factoid Warning Service. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Be on EXTREME danger alert for CF "CMDB savings of more than $1 million per year". BMC and Forrester are shovelling it.
Several readers argue well that ROI is not the right measure for a CMDB, but nevertheless management want to know what they get for their money, and BMC's own research suggests "not much".
The IT Skeptic believes that COBIT has matured to the point where the supporting books constitute a body of knowledge (BOK) that is coming close to a credible alternative to ITIL
A podcast of the origninal post Give up on ITIL V3 training and certification - it is not going to change
Yet another unhappy camper prompted me to hammer on the cold stone walls of Castle ITIL once again, right over the blood-stains of last time I tried. But I won't. I give up. ITIL training and certification isn't going to change. It has been taken over by the money engine and is lost. The real experts are elsewhere.
There are some fundamental fallacies behind the arguments for CMDB and a recent article encapsulated a number of them. Why do we keep getting told a CMDB is essential when almost nobody has one?
PM is the engine that moves much stuff (hopefully just about everything) from Development to Production, which is pretty important now that ITIL has muscled into Application Management. PM should interlock with Change Management and Testing. PM should provide most of the Early Life Support. Release and Deployment shouldn't move without PM: if it is big enough to be a release it should be a project. And so on.
Once upon a time IT Service Management was a movement dedicated to improving the levels of service delivered by IT. And ITIL was a body of knowledge put together by the government as a public service and released into the public domain. The books weren't free simply because costs had to be covered.
Now it is turning into just another snake oil peddled by shiny suits.