The IT Skeptic - Comments for "OGC gives us an ITIL V3 maturity assessment standard, but they won't publish"

Janus

JamesFinister — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:02:55 +0000

Yes, in the UK the model I'm seeing is third party infrastructure suppliers delivering services controlled contractually by an intelligent customer function. In addition it is the norm for several suppliers to be in the value network/chain, for instance applications support, the service desk, and networks might all be supported by other supplier, possibly delivering a commodity service level. Rather like the British and the Americans the danger is that we end up with "two countries separated by a common language" with both using ITIL terminology but interpreting it relative to their position in the supply chain.

One implication of this is that much we hold dear becomes problematic, like articulating and managing the link to end customer value. Company X&Y three layers down in the contractual hierarchy will provide their standard, technical, performance reports that make no mention of business impact. Not only that, but the retained customer IT department will have little or no influence over sub-contractor performance.

Aale is right that a strategy does not tell you how to shovel coal, but strategy does have to take into account the model for delivery of services. That means the strategy has to be formulated with an understanding of how the strategic objectives can be decomposed into coherent contractual targets. I did a lot of work on this back in 1996 at the start of UK government's Market Testing initiative based on Robert Smith's 'Sunningdale Model'.

Here we are in 2010 and I have to agree that v3 in its current form does not equate to the reality I see on a regular basis. It isn't that you can't use it, but you need to do constantly check which way you are facing. Hence the Janus title of this post.

Two worlds

aroos — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:03:41 +0000

I sat yesterday listening an excellent presentation on how to design and build datacenters by Mika Leno from Datacenter Finland. (Here is good tip for European consultants and IT infra managers. A datacenter in Finland saves millions of Euros in electricity costs due to our cold climate. There is also a lot of good space available, country is boringly stable, English is second language, (unofficial) etc.). Data center design is not so simple but all IT services need to have a solid and reliable data center somewhere.

On the other hand James writes in his recent blog that his customers do not run their infra, just manage the services and he does not even meet people who run the infra. http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/2010/04/international-perspective.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoreItsm+%28Core+ITSM%29. I suppose Chris has the same situation.

These two worlds seem to be more and more apart. One provides the basic infrastructure and the other works close with business to apply the infrastructure for the business needs. There is a huge difference between these two worlds and it is impossible to try to explain it with a single model like ITIL V3 tries to do. I see ITIL V2 is a model for the infra people but V3 does not know where it sits.

The engine room does not define strategy to shovel coal. Designing new services is quite different if you are a) an internal IT service manager, b) a basic IT infra service provider, c) a business IT service provider. It seems that ITIL wants to forget where the second "I" comes from, just like HDI is not Help Desk Institute or SAS is not Statistical Analysis System. We should clarify what we mean when we talk about IT service.

Aale

V2 terms

aroos — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:54:37 +0000

Was using V2 terms where the catalogue is a description of all services. (I'm in a middle of a V2 Foundation class and we were just discussing this phenomen.) One guy told how their sales just said yes to all customer requirements and signed the contract. He had a good comment: "The person who signs the contract has a lot of power over IT service".

IT can be part of the business but still it is the business that creates strategy, not IT. Personally I buy IT services but they are not really part of my business, just support it. I can do consulting without my laptop. My training might be better if I did not use PowerPoint.

One of my customer's business is to build ships. Would you say that IT is part of the business. My wife is a nurse and today hospitals use more and more IT which may or may not help them. Still IT is not the business of a hospital, it just one way to do the paperwork.

Aale

Service PORTFOLIO RAAAAAWWWRRR!!!!

riCh chestMat — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:55:00 +0000

"A practical problem for Service Level Management is that sales sells services that are not in the service catalogue, if they would stick to the catalogue there would be no sales."

I really hope you meant to say Service Portfolio because there would 'be sales' if both existing services from the catalogue and upcoming services from the Pipeline were sold. Catalogue by itself is just an audit.

P.S. IT is not to serve the business. IT IS part of business. Looking at it any other way and you might as well forget all this ITSM stuff, get outsourced and go back to replacing desktop PCs.

ITIL lacks real customer interface

aroos — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:22:05 +0000

Agree with James that ITIL maturity model is of little use. One should remember that ITIL does not have a function or process for sales or business relationships. I find it really amazing considering all this talk how V3 is serice and lifecycle oriented. In this sense ISO 20000 is a major step forward from ITIL V3.

In my experience real life service providers obey customers. Strategies and service design plans are dropped when THE major customers says that we want this. Only internal IT's may have the luxury of not listening to customers (until they are outsourced). IT is to serve the business. Business makes strategies and plans and IT's role is to help business to achieve the results it needs.

A practical problem for Service Level Management is that sales sells services that are not in the service catalogue, if they would stick to the catalogue there would be no sales.

Aale

How to pick a number.

JamesFinister — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:54:50 +0000

Maturity level: 5 is world class, heck we can undermine that by saying it is overkill. Obviously we can't go for any level below 3 because 0,1, or 2 sounds like re-branding failure as success. So Looks like it will be 3 or 4 then.

Availability: 5 9s if we are doing something important. Any other system? Gosh 99% sounds scarily high, so go for 98%, the customer will probably buy it.

That seems to be how so many people do it.

Terrifying, isn't it?

extract a number from a suitable orifice

skeptic — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:42:00 +0000

yes I blogged on Setting the target goal for service management initiatives:
how do we determine the to-be? Seems to me the standard model is to extract a number from a suitable orifice

Customer perspective

JamesFinister — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:11:17 +0000

Ian

Most of us have come across the situation where IT thinks all they need to do is a little optimising of the status quo, when the customer wants a total transformation of both the relationship and the service. Unfortunately maturity models don't tend to pick up on this, or that the most mature organisations are often the most self critical. I believe that sadly many customers have given up hoping that IT will really change, yet real IT maturity depends on an engaged customer voice.

Dare we assess the maturity of the customer interface

ianclayton — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:51:16 +0000

James, as you might suspect - I feel you have hit the nail again.... Critical to any service provider maturity model against which an organization and its processes might be assessed, are questions and methods to unearth the customer interaction points and recognition within the provider that improvement is most effective here.

Yes, I know - there goes Ian again on Outside-In thinking... guilty as charged. This is all about providing service to satisfy customers, not just the management of services. There is a silent 'C' in ITSM - the customer. Customer outcomes and the activities they perform to achieve them makeup services. IMHO an assessment should start with the customer and 'processes' (if you must use that word) that manage the customer interaction and customer experience.

We might find that this approach lures us into areas of application development....

Assessment against COBIT

JamesFinister — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:14:30 +0000

I quite like the COBIT assessment model, to be honest I can't see what additional real world benefit would be gained by mapping it on to ITIL.

What is missing perhaps is something more fundamental, a tool that would help IT organisations decide what maturity level they need to achieve to meet the needs of their customer.

ITIL V3 Maturity Model Self Assessment a Cottage Industry

choofca — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:42:42 +0000

My thoughts about this : OGC is not giving any hints of an ITIL process maturity model definition. Hence many
ITSM consultancy firms had been making lots of money creating their own version of ITIL process maturity definitions for organizations willing to buy such a service. In this tough economic climate, parting money for a non OGC endorsed industry maturity model definition is not going to be that easy.

My thoughts for a better selling point is using the COBIT 4.1 maturity model. The maturity for the 34 processes are explicitly mentioned in Cobit 4.1 and the COBIT-ITIL V3 document shows that majority of these processes can be mapped to ITIL V3 processes criteria + PMO too! So if a self assessment tool base on the 120+ control objectives is created and linked back to the process maturity definition for those 34 COBIT processes and later using the Cobit 4.1 to ITIL V3 document mapped back to the 23++ ITIL V3 process, an COBIT and ITIL V3 (and even PMO) process maturity can be derived through the appropriate groupings. Additional selling point: COBIT's online assessment tool: Plucking the overall COBIT process maturity numbers onto the ISACA tool will provide an industry benchmark.

Thoughts?

Ok

aroos — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:10:09 +0000

Peter
Ok, it looks like you are right on the UK itSMF role, strange though. I think I was told that the itSMF UK scheme is voluntary.

I do ISO 20000 assesment all the time and I tell my customer what improvements they should do but I suppose that software companies would like to have an certificate. I think that the point in ISO 20000 is that there is a structure and a system for independent certification.

Aale

Aale, If you look at this

pjotrg — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:21:24 +0000

Aale,

If you look at this page (http://www.isoiec20000certification.com/lookuplist.asp?Type=6) you will see that its itSMF UK thats registers RCB's and grants them permission RCB to perform ISO 20.000 audits. I think it's wierd, but is is a fact.

I think you misread my post about the software accreditation pas. Indeed ISO 20.000 is not about software. I was not suggesting to make a new ISO standard either.

We talked about checking compiance agains a standard and agreed that ITIL is not a standard. ISO 20.000 is. If you look at it from a very very simplistic point of view ISO 20.000 not much more than: thou shalt do what ITIL suggests. If you can give proof of that, and have some sort of quality system, you may acquire the ISO 20.000 certificat.

As there are many software solutions that claim to support the ITIL processes (which we find back in ISO 20.000) it would be very easy to assess whether a software solution supports everything that's needed to comply with the ISO 20.000 standard.

Peter Gerritsen

I don't think itSMF UK owns it

aroos — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:02:14 +0000

ISO 20000 certification rights belong to the ISO organization, which has national representatives. These can appoint Registered Certification Bodies. If I recall it right, the itSMF UK scheme separates the role of the consultant and auditor. The RCB is not allowed to do the 2nd party audit. 3rd party audit is the actual certification audit.

Unfortunately this is not so in other countries where RCB's can do both 2nd and 3rd party audits. This at least doubles their business but puts them in an advisory role. It means that they are not any more fully independent when auditing the organization a second time.

ISO 2000 is a standard for IT Service Management system, not software. This would mean that ISO would need to create a software standard. I don't think they would take it so lightly as OGC, ISO standards are not created by one man in the wink of an eye.
Aale

I think I've see the light

pjotrg — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:58:57 +0000

ITIL is no standard, everybody agrees.

ISO 20.000 is a standard, published and all ;-)

So why not assess software products agains ISO 20.000, sort of...if you completely implement this software you're very likely to succesfully pass an ISO 20.000 audit.

Besides...this would generate money for itSMF UK who owns the certification scheme for ISO 20000, although I never understood why this is owend by itSMF instead of for example BSI. Can anyone explain (sorry bit off topic but I'm curious).

I couldn't possibly comment

skeptic — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:30:55 +0000

I couldn't possibly comment on Bernie.

There's financial motives and financial motives. Pickpockets have a financial motive and so do postmen. I just wanted to be clear where I saw it on the cynical <-> crooked spectrum.

But the real point I'm making is that a conspiracy implies a plan, an underlying purpose, and some central mind. It isn't like that. Nobody is in any more control of ITIL than of a stampeding herd. Most of those in Castle ITIL are a bit surprised to find themselves galloping in front of such a big stampede and some are just trying to stay ahead. ITIL is a phenomenon not a plot.

Who's talking evil or crooked

buraddo — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:31:57 +0000

You calling Bernie Eccelstone evil and/or crooked ?

Also, did I indicate financial motive was bad.

Perhaps the conspiracy theory speak was a little of misplaced fun, but it highlighted a point by taking a radical position.

All I proposed is that the decisions made regarding the leadership of ITIL make sense in the context of financial motive. Words of community, membership and certainly "foundations" are misplaced in this context. They should be replaced by user groups, customers and corporations.

Brad Vaughan

ITIL V3 Self Assessment Maturity Model

skeptic — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:21:47 +0000

Someone else thinks ITIL can be assessed. ITIL Live has announced

Self Assessment Maturity Model - created by one of the Authors of the core ITIL V3 Service Lifecycle publications

not a fan of conspiracy theories

skeptic — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:39:00 +0000

As a skeptic, I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories. They tend to fail the Occam's razor test. I seldom question people's motives on this blog. Execution yes, ethics no. All are professionals trying to make a buck from what they know, and yes get some recognition too. Very few are anything but straight-up honest. Even the vendors and analysts are just doing a job: pumping up the market for their bosses. The only ones getting really rich out of ITIL are the owners of the companies selling software and consulting and training - and many of the smaller owners will only get rich if they manage to cash in (and good on them - I admire entrepreneurs). A few consultants make a pretty buck but not really rich (read Richistan).

there's no evil genius on a desert island somewhere with a persian cat and a worldwide network of ITSM spies. The industry is a self-fueling phenomenon - everyone gives the bandwagon a push while jumping on.

Castle ITIL is aloof and capricious and at times bumbling, but it means well. It is no more crooked than any other assembly of white-collar professionals on the planet (and I consider that to mean "not very").

Patsies

buraddo — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:07:44 +0000

In true conspiracy fashion.. The faces we see are the patsies of the whole scheme. Those seeking famous and kudos are puppet for the mechanics of the conspiracy.. I am not sure ISACA makes much money from there audit scheme..

Somewhere in Castle IT lies a Bernie Ecclestone style puppet master making a happy penny from the process.. No other motive fits the execution path they have taken. I don't accept the ignorance play for a minute..

Plus, conspiracies are fun and make good content for blogs :)

Brad Vaughan

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "OGC gives us an ITIL V3 maturity assessment standard, but they won&#039;t publish"

Janus

Two worlds

V2 terms

Service PORTFOLIO RAAAAAWWWRRR!!!!

ITIL lacks real customer interface

How to pick a number.

extract a number from a suitable orifice

Customer perspective

Dare we assess the maturity of the customer interface

Assessment against COBIT

ITIL V3 Maturity Model Self Assessment a Cottage Industry

Ok

Aale, If you look at this

I don't think itSMF UK owns it

I think I've see the light

I couldn't possibly comment

Who's talking evil or crooked

ITIL V3 Self Assessment Maturity Model

not a fan of conspiracy theories

Patsies

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "OGC gives us an ITIL V3 maturity assessment standard, but they won't publish"