CobiT

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.

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?

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.

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[Updated again: links to COBIT planned content]
Those who say "COBIT is the what and ITIL the how" either haven't read COBIT, are oversimplifying or are being excessively polite to ITIL.

The long awaited ITIL V3 - COBIT V4.1 mapping white paper is available ... for a price. This is the final paper in a long-awaited series that answer the question left unanswered by the ITIL V3 books - how does ITIL relate to the standards and frameworks around it? The answer is that ITIL is very much a subset of COBIT's more comprehensive coverage.

Many people, such as ITSMView, are asking the question "Is ISO 20000 set to take over ITIL?" Perhaps they should be looking over their shoulder at another ISO standard and the associated industry: ISO9000.

itSMF exists as a marketing arm of the ITSM industry, by definition. An open market is a wonderfully self-levelling system: money flows where the potential money is. So itSMF forms a very good indicator of where the interest or 'action' is in ITSM at the time. Right now it is ITIL. But what about the future?

As the IT Skeptic digs (happily) deeper into COBIT, I ponder the difference between COBIT and ITIL. In my simple layman's mind, ITIL is the hitchhiker's guide, COBIT is the encyclopaedia, rather like the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Encyclopedia Galactica.

ITIL certainly does not cover all aspects of "IT Infrastructure" as the name suggests. It does not even cover all aspects of an IT Service Management Library, which would be a more accurate name for its scope. For a framework that pays much lip service to the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, it is light on with any part of that cycle except "Do".