ITIL

Service Management is always on about Continual Service Improvement, as if this was a holy grail and an assumed permanent state of change. What seems inadequately discussed is where does it end? Do we improve forever? Surely not. We must encounter diminishing returns until eventually we are just gilding the lily. Is the "to-be" always different from the "as-is"? or rather is it always sufficiently different to justify doing something about it?

Here's hoping the upcoming (any day now, apparently) COBIT User's Guide for Service Managers is closely followed by a certification. Imagine "COBIT Certified Service Manager". Wouldn't that put a cat amongst the ITIL pigeons?

[This post has been rewritten. I got it wrong and it contained errors of fact. So one or two of the comments don't quite follow on from the revised text]

Call of a crow!!* What is going on in Castle ITIL? Is there a battle royal between vendor factions? The whole V3 Certification thing is lurching around like a pantomime donkey where the front guy has flatulence. e-learning is now in the syllabus (I am told but cannot confirm that it was not explicitly specified previously). This leads to a dire prediction for ATOs if Castle ITIL decides to cut out the middleman...

The IT Skeptic is not anti-ITIL V3. ITSM View suggests "There are plenty out there that are seemingly wanting to derail ITIL v3". I'm not one of them. Nor can I think of anyone who is. That blog post has the heading "Where is the love?". Let us not confuse reluctance to leap immediately into bed with active animosity.

There is an excellent online credit calculator on APMG's ITIL Official Site that I hadn't noticed before (thanks to Rocky K.K. Lam) .

Many people argue that there is no such thing as ITIL compliance because there is no exact standard to audit against. Perhaps it is all semantics but I don't take such an absolute position - it seems to me that it ought to be measurable or at least assessable in some way. On the other hand I think the opposite statement is clearly true: There is no such thing as ITIL NON-compliant software tools.

With seemingly everyone gouging the ITIL user these days, is there an alternative for those of us who can't just (or just can't) get the boss to pay the exorbitant prices? You bet.

We can do without all this angst about "Should we do ITIL?" That is the last question we should ask ourselves.

Research on ITIL ROI would be a useful thing for the general information of the industry, but if you are considering whether or not to adopt ITIL, any ROI information you can find now is useless.