By guestblogger Beardy:

From the “No *expletive* Sherlock !!!” department….

For the better part of a quarter century we’ve been fed a complicated and more importantly self-serving lie… that ITIL was the IT Holy Grail that would bring the equivalent of the manufacturing industry’s QA to ITSM, felling in one swoop all the ills of IT…. sorry, wrong.

Even the most quality-conscious engineer will tell you that “QA” only aims to deliver a consistent level of output. Not premium quality. No iterative improvement in quality. Most importantly, no guarantee that the resulting output is always zero-defect. The aim is consistency, not quality. If your base quality is good, then you will deliver a quality product consistently by applying QA. Sadly, if your base quality is poor, then guess what…. QA will only ensure you deliver that consistently….. whoops..

Enter a bunch of British government braniacs… now you KNOW that will result in a quality outcome ! *choke*

So it came to pass that these bureaucrats came up with *drum-roll*…. a bureaucratic, documentation-heavy “solution” to implement an IT-oriented QA system with levels of qualification, individual certifications, etc, etc, etc…. how NOT surprising for a bunch of bureaucrats….

Now it is packaged and sold to businesses globally as “ITIL”, which is now in its 3rd iteration of trying to get it right…. so…. v1.0 must have been typical software “quality” (we ALL know better than to buy into v1.0 !)…

So, like so many other certification systems, the cost for certification is horrendous. It almost makes the software systems that are meant to support these “best practices” look cheap….

So with billions of dollars expended globally on making businesses “ITIL aligned”, you would expect that ITSM was now pretty mature and safe for non-aligned businesses to adopt…. wrong…. if a certain tier-1 OEM’s “best of breed” software for managing ITSM and implementing business practices that a business can leverage to make themselves “ITIL aligned” is anything to go by….. well, let’s just say, that business better have deep pockets and VERY patient staff and customers…..

If it is such a pain; so problematic to implement; so expensive, etc.. then why do businesses persist ? Well as I see it (yes, brace for soap box time…), the reality is that the CIOs, CTOs are all so indoctrinated by the “Institute of Management” spiel and government agencies are SO risk-averse, that it is now an almost unavoidable necessity for most medium to large enterprises if they want to do business at the “big end of town”. Meanwhile SMEs will struggle to justify the cost….

Which leads on to the quote near the end of the article…. can you say “self serving” ?

Whose idea was this, anyway?
Where did the standard model come from in the first place? The answer is both ironic and deeply suspicious: It came from the IT outsourcing industry, which has a vested interest in encouraging internal IT to eliminate everything that makes it more attractive than outside service providers.

“Everything you’ve been told is wrong: What IT should do instead”
http://infoworld.com/print/108477

Ref:
http://www.itilsurvival.com/itilhistory.html

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 1:34 pm and is filed under ICT Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.