Open ITIL

guerino1 — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:12:04 +0000

Hi Rob,

Here are a bunch of possible reasons for people not pushing harder for Open ITIL...

You stated: "I am always surprised by the lack of interest amongst the ITIL masses in the governance of the body of knowledge that forms a foundation of their career.". It's quite possible that there aren't "massess" that use ITIL to form a foundation for their career. In this case, I'd bet that most people just view ITIL as another certification that helps their career and not as something that forms the foundation for their career's success. For example, I know many people who work in Change Management, full time, who have no ITIL certification. However, they're great at what they do. This doesn't mean that knowing ITIL Change Management doesn't help. It just means that many can still be successful without it.
Most people don't have enough insight into what all of this means until they dive into it. I've found, from my own experiences, that many people like to "wade" into large bodies of knowledge, taking little bits of interest as starting points and diving deeper until they get what they want out of them.
Exclusivity might be an issue. I remember one gentleman that was certified at all three levels of ITIL and no one else in his organization was certified, at all. He stood out as being the walking reference to ITIL and he loved being in that role. If the material was open, he may have felt that there was less of a need for him and that his ITIL qualifications weren't as valuable to the organization.
Maybe, there's a perception that the information available through ITIL isn't as valuable as smaller groups might profess it to be. Remember, things like Call Centers, Incident Management, Configuration Management, etc. were around long before ITIL and many companies implement such solutions, successfully, without any insight into ITIL, at all. I know many people that salivate at the thought of getting to all of the information in Gartner and Forrester. I rarely find anyone who views ITIL as the keys to strategic success.
Maybe it's the view that a great deal of ITIL is still lacking in its content and, therefore, its value. I give the classic example of Configuration Management. Many people believe that ITIL was and continues to be very far off the mark on this.
Maybe, most people in IT still don't understand the value of the content. The industry, after all, is still in its infancy, if you really think about it.
Maybe, many ITILers are frustrated with the lack of willingness from their organizations to change, deeming any attempt to open up ITIL content to be futile, since what they've worked so hard to learn and profess is being ignored.

I hope this adds value.

My Best,

Frank

The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)
Open IT Best Practices

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Response from British Government to appeals for Free ITIL"

Open ITIL