skeptic's blog

The TSO bull is back in the ITIL china-shop: TSO issues take-down notices

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2013-02-24 21:58

standoverThe TSO bull is back in the ITIL china-shop. Tweet this. The legal department of The Stationery Office (the publishers of ITIL) sent a letter to the publisher Lulu.com (not me) complaining that my book Owning ITIL® "contains the Intellectual Property associated with ITIL". This was puzzling. More than that, it was bloody annoying, as Lulu delete a disputed book without recourse, the big pussies.

It was especially annoying once I established just how trivial and vexatious the complaint really was. TSO are acting like a legal bully and the world should know it. Especially they should know it right now, as the Cabinet Office are negotiating the sale of ITIL's rights.

If this is Castle ITIL's idea of how to build a community, then ITIL's demise looks ever more certain. It is disheartening.

What will affect the service desk over the next three years

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2013-02-24 00:20

Malcolm Fry asked me this question for his Session 602 The Service Desk: Past, Present & Future at the upcoming HDI conference in the USA. His question reminded me that I have been off in the philosophical never-never for too long. It is high time I got back to the bread-and-butter folks at the pointy front end of IT: the service desk team. So here are my thoughts on Malcolm's excellent question: What will affect the service desk over the next three years? Tweet this.
[Updated 25/2/13: added Bring Your own App and internal social media]

ITSM in Cherry Valley

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2013-02-17 16:51

I'm getting lots of positive feedback about my series of articles for The ITSM Review, which use a train crash in Cherry Valley, Illinois as a case study for understanding incident and problem management. (It is part of a wider theme of my articles for The ITSM Review using railroad examples for service management).

It always mystifies me that people (and ITIL) don't grok this simple model: incident management is about users, problem management is about causes.

A quest for a unified theory of IT management is not a flag of ITSM surrender

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2013-02-10 22:41

Some folk have interpreted my last post on A unified theory of IT management as surrender to the DevOps movement: "OMG DevOps was right all along, what a fool I have been". Not at all. I'm saying both the DevOps and the ITSM communities need to move on and find something that works for everyone.

Kamu: a unified theory of IT management - reconciling DevOps and ITSM/ITIL

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2013-02-05 22:18

I know many in the DevOps community wrote me off as a lost cause, but brothers and sisters I have seen the light after reading this: On Antifragility in Systems and Organizational Architecture from Jez Humble. I pledge myself to spending 2013 [and 2014 and 2015] uniting the DevOps and ITSM communities. Tweet this.

Vendors love to promise to play nicely

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2013-02-05 04:31

Hey, remember all the fine words about CMDBf? or networkedhelpdesk.org? Vendors love to promise to play nicely because it helps overcome buyer concerns and close the sales. But it is pretty rare for it to ever come to anything. SNMP was an exception. Don't fall for the sweet promises: whatever the vendors say, they won't love each other in the morning.

In Praise of Practice

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2013-01-29 22:12

Today we look at three topics linked by one word: "Practice". We throw that word around all the time, as in "best practice" and "good practice", without enough thought as to what it actually means, and without enough appreciation of the power of this lovely word.

On collaboration and debate

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2013-01-27 23:30

Social media has taken collaboration to new levels of connectivity over distance and inter-connectedness of specialists. We are creating whole, new online business communities thinking and working together. Business collaboration isn't some kumbaya love-fest. Tweet this. Collaboration is not going to reconcile east and west or spawn a better society. Collaboration facilitates debate and grows ideas.

How embarrassing for CSC

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2013-01-24 22:54

There is some appallingly bad information on the internet about ITSM. But you don't expect to see it in an article from a TechWeb magazine and you don't expect to see it from CSC. This is awful.

Book review: the Phoenix Project

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2013-01-22 20:25

The Phoenix Project is a novel about IT management. Writing a fictional account is a powerful effective way to get the message across, used by others such as Ely Goldratt with The Goal. It is written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford, the team who gave us Visible Ops, one of the more talked-about books in IT (I really must review that one day). I liked the book; you should read it, but I have a few big problems with it. The Phoenix Project is an important-enough book to warrant taking the time to discuss what those problems are.

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