ITIL

The Pillars of ITIL

skeptic — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:53:11 -0700

ITIL started out as just the books, but it is much more today: it is a movement, a professional group, and an industry. A great deal of activity goes on in promotion and support of ITIL worldwide. Much of it is ungoverned and ad-hoc. There are many pillars of the house of ITIL and OGC governs and manages only four.

How is ITIL Live doing?

skeptic — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:21:33 -0700

I wonder how the ITIL Live website is doing. And where they get their customers from.

Un-Common Language

Alison Adams — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:43:23 -0700

[A guest post today from long-time reader Alison Adams with more feedback from the field on ITIL V3 exam questions:]

How confident are you in identifying the difference/s between a stated AIM, a PURPOSE, a GOAL and an OBJECTIVE ?

A dictionary might not help much, look them up in dictionary.com, they reference one another in a complete circle. Even the official ITIL glossary includes -

"Objective: the defined purpose or aim of a Process and Activity or an Organisation….."

Setting the target goal for service management initiatives

skeptic — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:05:50 -0700

When we want to know how to, say, measure a service desk, we can find quite exact guidance everywhere. But it seems to me the depth and specificity (specifity? specificness?) and usefulness of advice is inversely proportional to the importance of the question. Consider the most important question we need answered in a service management initiative.

Crap Factoid Alerts: Strong Commitment to ITIL3, 72% trained, 94% planning, 89% predictable costs....

skeptic — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:24:33 -0700

An ITIL V3 report from Sunrise Software is rich in crap factoids, since the report itself suffers from all the methodological deficiencies we have described before. Mercifully this one may not get much airtime so we rate the risk Medium.

Where does continual service improvement end? An important ITIL question

skeptic — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:56:08 -0700

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?

COBIT Certified Service Manager: a cat amongst the ITIL pigeons

skeptic — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:05:56 -0600

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?

ITIL V3 Certification via online training is back on again

skeptic — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:59:12 -0600

[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...

ITIL V3 love takes time

skeptic — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:24:11 -0600

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.

Excellent ITIL V2 and V3 certification training credits calculator

skeptic — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:20:54 -0600

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) .