The Skeptical Informer, October 2009, Volume 3, No. 8
The newsletter of the IT Skeptic. All the IT skeptical news that is fit to print... and then some!
Features
Along the way, I've somehow never got around to discussing a very important paper: Aligning COBIT® 4.1, ITIL® V3 and ISO/IEC 27002 for Business Benefit. This is one of the official OGC Alignment White Paper Series that do the alignment between ITIL V3 and the other frameworks, that ITIL V3 should have done in the first place.
It is not often you read something that completely changes the way you look at IT. This paper How Complex Systems Fail rocked me. Reading this made me completely rethink ITSM, especially Root Cause Analysis, Major Incident Reviews, and Change Management.
The more I think about it the more convinced I become that the way ITIL and COBIT and ISO20000 structure incident and request fails the basic test of being customer-focused or business-aligned.
Once again the comment discussion on this blog has dug down to a very fundamental question: Is ITIL there to describe what the experts know? Or is it there to guide those setting out on the ITSM journey?
Being a simple soul with only a limited grasp of ITIL, sometimes I'm sure I've missed something obvious. Like when I went looking in the Service Strategy book to find where the overall business plan or organisational strategy informs the service strategy. If IT is your business, if you are an IT service provider company, then I can see SS working. But for an internal service provider, for an IT department, SS reads as if service strategy is developed in isolation from the rest of the organisation, as if we treat the rest of the organisation as a remote customer of services instead of as the same team, from whom we take direction. At what point in SS do we ask the Board? At what point does the corporate executive inject policy? Where do we align with the business strategy? Or did I miss something?
A hundred users call up and say they can't get emails. One incident or 100?
Fundamental and simple question. Go check ITIL for the answer. I'll wait.
Service management is IT. It is a way of describing how to do IT - all of it. When it comes to the scope of service management in general and ITIL in particular, the IT Skeptic has had a change of mind. In the past I accused ITIL V3 of having aspirations beyond its station, of trying to take on areas where it has no business going, such as strategy, applications and security. I don't think so any more: now I just think ITIL did it half-heartedly, too anaemically to be taken seriously by areas of IT outside of IT Operations. But Service Management definitely should go there.
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