The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Book review: "I Think Something is Missing From ITIL" by Ian Clayton, reviewed by the IT Skeptic"

Re-sourcing

JamesFinister — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:28:43 +0000

Aale,

Insourcing has happened in the UK, and incumbent suppliers do get replaced. It is one of the things that keeps me in work. I'll dig out a study for you that was done a couple of years ago over here.. Sadly the mistakes that contribute to dissatisfaction with one contract are often repeated with the new one.

Here's one of my favourite stories about supplier awareness of the impact on their customers

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/12/ibm_new_zealand/

That is the short term model

aroos — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:51:00 +0000

Ok, I'm not saying that outsourcers are perfect and I know that not all customers are happy. On the other hand, have you seen a movement back to insourcing?

What I'm saying is that those IT people I have met seem to be quite aware that they have customers and they are dependent on them. That does not mean that they will want to offer good service all the time. There is no reason to believe that internal IT people would any more willing to sacrifice for the good of their internal customer.

Usually people actually want to do a good job and awareness helps them to make better choices.

Aale

PS I'm doing a little survey on outsourcing satisfaction but do not have the results yet.

they know their customers well alright

skeptic — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:08:49 +0000

Yes, I think for many outsourcers their business model is economies of scale, minimum variations between customers, and service at lowest possible cost. So they know their customers well alright: they know exactly how far they can bend them without breaking them, how far they can frustrate them without losing them, how much they can milk them without it being cheaper to back out of the deal.

Profit maximisation is not the same as customer focus

JamesFinister — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:15:38 +0000

Aale,

I would say my experience of outsourcers and customer focus is decidedly mixed. The customer focus is largely pre-sale and stops as soon as delivery commences.
Very few outsourcing deals seem to meet the customer's long term expectations. Customers have to bear some of the blame, for instance because they don't make their expectations clear, or because they rely on the personality of their best friend the account manager/salesman.

The idealist in me would love to think that there is a clear link between customer focus as we think of it and commercial success, but I'm not sure there is. What suppliers are usually good at is knowing the tolerance of their clients and the weaknesses in their systems of internal control.

In an odd sense this is where the cloud scores from a customer perspective. You might not get as good a service as buying a bespoke service, but you will at least get the service you are paying for and it will meet your (lowered) expectations.

I'm aware I've made some glib generalisations in this post, as I say my experiences have been mixed, and I know there are suppliers who struggle to provide the service that is in the best interest of their customers.

Where is the lack of customer focus

aroos — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:37:02 +0000

The outsources have learned customer focus a long time a go, their customers are real paying customers and all staff known what it means to lose a customer. In their wold there is no lack of customer focus

On the other hand V3 has very little customer focus. The strategy and service lifecycle concepts are pretty internal with no role for business relationship management or sales.

Aale

three more

skeptic — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:39:33 +0000

1) yes totally agree, "adding value" was the wrong phrase. I've said what I think about IT innovation - load of crap, rare as hens' teeth. i meant adding value as in being useful, packing in behind, contributing to what the business is doing, avoiding dragging the team down.

2) i'm intrigued. My own belief in the rightness of service management is entirely an act of faith based on my own anecdotal evidence. But that evidence is strong that this stuff is worth doing. Failures in its application come I think from running before we can walk, and failing to deal with people issues. I've blogged about this somewhere but I can't find it: technology is changing far too fast for the race to cope with and now process theory is changing too fast too. I don't think you can drag the world into a new generation of ITIL in a year or even five. And you can't build a V3 organisation in five years either.

3) The suppliers who contributed to ITIL are not outsourcing suppliers: they are suppliers of software and consulting and training. the more users of ITIL the better - outsourcing just shrinks their market.
I think most ISO standards committees seem to do a good job of canvassing enough knowledgeable people from a wide enough base, and COBIT didn't do a bad job either. it can be done. So why is there no KCS in ITIL? or ASL? Why does COBIT have whole sections that aren't in ITIL? Why has MOF got more on roles and accountabilities? it was all there...

Three counter responses

JamesFinister — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:15:32 +0000

1) Chris Dancy recently tweeted on ITIL//ITSM as religion. Perhaps the mantra that IT, the sort of day to day IT most of us really do,"adds value" falls into that category. After all it is the job of the business to add value, The role of IT is to enable the business and not get in the way. From a 25 year career I'm struggling to think of cases where I could say the predominant role of operational IT has been to add value. Maybe that's why we struggle to prove ITIL ROI? On the other hand I find it all too easy to think of cases where IT has hampered the business, and quite a few cases where poor IT has deflected attention from an under performing business.

I'm not about to throw the baby out with the bath water. I remain 100% convinced that IT has to have customer focus rather than being about playing with new toys, defending old ways of working, and hiding behind suppliers. What I'm suggesting is that if most IT shops adopted something as simple as a combination of ISO 20000 and 38500 at a reasonable level of maturity then it would make a world of difference. Go back to 1995 and the BSI PD0005 Code of Practice for IT Service Management for an excellent basic guide to what matters in exactly 100 pages. It is better to adopt something simple successfully and in it s entirety, perhaps, than to aim for the moon but blow up on the launch pad.

2) Agree with all that, but is there something more psychological going on? Why do we see so many IT shops who are struggling with the basics suddenly claiming to be doing v3 ITIL? Why do we see so much strategy in v3 when, if the recent Linkedin debate is considered, it seems we haven't got an effective framework for problem management yet? And why does the ITIL world seem unable to apply ITIL to its own business?

3) There is nothing wrong with a marrow contribution base as along as it is the correct one. Since a common complaint about the contribution base is the predominance of suppliers surely that should encourage a bias towards ITIL in an outsourced environment?

OK to return to the religious analogy I am partly playing devil's advocate here. But only partly

three responses

skeptic — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:54:51 +0000

1) The path from broken to fixed should point towards adding value. All the things the business think of as "broken" are symptomatic of not being a value-add integrated part of the business. For ITIL to focus on its older internal-fix mindset would be to lose what little outward customer focus it has achieved so far. Rather than wanting ITIL to go back to some traditional roots, I think ITIL doesn't go far enough

2) I think it is symptomatic of a lack of rigour, a narrow contribution base (and yet perversely i think there is also a committee effect), that same inward focus we discussed in (1), and awful reviewing. I'd love to see the world apply the same level of scrutiny and analysis to the other IT frameworks: COBIT, ISO20000, and eSCM; and the generic SM frameworks CMMI-SVC and USMBOK. Would we find the sme level of errors and inconsistencies?

3) narrow contribution base, that same old-school inward focus we discussed in (1). IT has to 'come out' and ITIL is slow to help. For all the lip-service, four books of ITIL are written as if IT existed on an island and dealt with everyone else remotely.

Editing

JamesFinister — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:52:41 +0000

There would be less mistakes in the above post if it hadn't been for the lack of sleep caused by the aforementioned daughter's party going on downstairs.

Very good questions

aroos — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:40:41 +0000

1) I think yes
2) This haunts me too. Why do we have all these discussions of some small put important practical details?
3) Me too (I thought it might be Finland only, that other countries still have these big internal IT departments)

Aale

Three thoughts before the New Year

JamesFinister — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:04:05 +0000

Ian,

Since you posted this three thoughts have been rumbling away at the back of my mind with nmore force than usual. Let me stress that these are only thoughts and don't represent my view 100%, but they are the thoughts that I run through at 2am when my daughter's party is still keeping me awake.

1: Is there a basic mismatch between what the more vocal advocates of ITIL believe it should achieve and the requirements of the business? I'm asking the question from a practical perspective rather than a theoretic one in that most business clients I work with want ITIL to fix an IT service that is broken in many many, whereas it is the IT clients who talk about more about adding value to the business and contributing to strategy.

That isn't to say I disagree to the shift towards adding value, but I wonder if ITIL was most powerful as a tool when it had a clearer remit.

2: It is interesting to spot mistakes and omissions in ITIL, but is it more productive to consider why those omissions and mistakes have come about? Is it just lack of discipline and knowledge or is it symptomatic of bigger issues?

3: I live and work in an IT culture absolutley dominated by outsourcing, sub contracting and complex supply and value chains/networks. So why do I still feel our ITSM models do not reflect this? How do I relate the supplier management function badgering a supplier to meet their contractual requirements with both the customers' and the suppliers' CSI and problem management functions?

Is there interest in an updated book on whats missing from ITIL?

ianclayton — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:06:53 +0000

Skep

An update. The book is no longer available. I rescinded the publishing rights. I have an updated version in draft that inspects V3 to see what if any of the 500+ issues listed were addressed by the refresh. I have also tuned down and out direct criticisms that were borne out of frustration and the time of writing the original version. I have also added about 1200 simialr issues found within ITIL V3.

Given the recent OGC Mandate for Change project, I was wondering if there is interest in a refreshed version? If anyone is interested such a refresh of the original publication, it truly had use to protect consultants against over reaching customer expectations of ITIL, I might move it higher in my list of things to do....

The holistic service management and service lifecycle discussions are of course addressed in more detail in the Guide to the Universal Service Management Body of Knowledge (USMBOK) book I subsequently authored...

Any interest out there?

In THEORY itSMF represents

skeptic — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:33:59 +0000

In THEORY itSMF represents the interests of members to "harness global resources to strengthen IT Service Management, support its growth into new markets, direct its expansion into new models and protect its integrity.
"

What is itSMF for again?

kengon — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:01:41 +0000

I'll give you the part about promoting professionalism, but I think that's on pretty shaky ground. It's not like holding a certification having to live up to a code of ethics to maintain that certification.

I don't buy the representation part. How does itSMF represent the members? To whom? For what?

Stewardship and Openness

kengon — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:03:39 +0000

So, FWIW, I agree with you on both points... and I'll expand a little about what I meant. I have no objection to the APM Group running certification. If they can do it, so much the better. I never thought that itSMF should be doing that work.

The problem I see is openness in the evolution of the framework, hence my comment on stewardship. Nothing about the current construction is customer-centric, then again gov't agencies don't necessarily have strong track records in that regard.

APMG in administering the certification program by default becomes best positioned to influence the framework... not the individual content authors. After all, it's what you're tested on that gets you the certificate, not what's in the books. Some of what candidates are tested on now isn't necessarily in the Red/Blue books (depending upon version) today, eh?

I think that itSMF could have been a player in providing the connections to grassroots support and paving the way for how ITIL could have evolved. That's just not how it's unfolded. From what I can tell, I think it's highly unlikely that would ever happen. As a result, I'm betting that the U.S. support base is likely to come apart at high speed looking for something "that just works".

the itSMF may one day regret their choice of name

skeptic — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:46:55 +0000

Very interesting points. I've said before that the itSMF may one day regret their choice of name. That was in a slightly different context, where I've seen IT taking SM skills to the business, e.g. HR asks IT to set up service desk processes for them

As I pondered further on the

dool — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:05:52 +0000

As I pondered further on the new version, I was struck by a thought.

V3 brings IT to the service industry, rather than bringing the service industry to IT. ITSM is full of artificial distinctions (ITSM, IT Service, BITA). The draft I reviewed made an effort to remove these distinctions, treating IT as another sector in the service industry. This will probably be jarring for those who psychologically identify themselves as ITSM practitioners rather than SM practitioners. Another artificial distinction.

Some might object, saying IT has special challenges. I'm not convinced. Don't all services have challenges on availability, capacity, and so on?

The more I digest the material, the more it grows on me.

V3

dool — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 18:37:38 +0000

I can only comment on the one book I've reviewed. I came away with the impression that the authors not only had a deep understanding of the topic, but intentionally sought to balance theory and practice. IMHO, a heavy skew toward practical is as detrimental as a skew towards theory. Teach me to fish, as well as provide a map to the pond.

Will this work for all audiences? Not likely. I, however, found it a welcome relief from the bullet-point inputs/outputs "practical" approach.

Service Management is far more than SS and SD. I welcomed the focus/clarity on this thing called a service. V2 sort of took it for granted that any "non-material good" thrown into an SLA could be a service. That was just plain nonsense. V3 is much more disciplined. I found two new terms to be jarring at first. Now a few weeks later I found myself using them in practice and growing to better appreciate them: Utility and Warranty.

There are areas I wish could have been more fully developed, such as governance and SOA. The "core advice" from V2 was starting to look more like commodity/good practice rather than best-practice or innovation. So I can't say I'm disappointed it won't all be re-packaged and re-sold at the new ITIL prices.

There is one thing for sure that no one has called out. V3 turned out to be far more than a refresh.

It probably would not have been appropriate for the IT Skeptic

skeptic — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 10:10:39 +0000

It probably would not have been appropriate for the IT Skeptic to sign up as a V3 reviewer but I kinda wish I had now. All these second and third hand reports... My gut instinct (with which I am well endowed) tells me the hype is far exceeding the reality with V3. Not long now until we know...

personally I agree about

skeptic — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 10:07:10 +0000

personally I agree about APMG in as much as I didn't think it was itSMf's business to be going after the business. Although it was more appropriate than going after the other half of the CAR (the publishing bit) which was just crass commercial empire building. I'm glad we lost both: it allows itSMF to focus on what it is there for: representing the members and promoting professionalism in ITSM. (The certification side of CAR can be argued to be appropriate to "promoting professionalism" though personally I suspect the motivations for chasing it were more venal).

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Book review: &quot;I Think Something is Missing From ITIL&quot; by Ian Clayton, reviewed by the IT Skeptic"

Re-sourcing

That is the short term model

they know their customers well alright

Profit maximisation is not the same as customer focus

Where is the lack of customer focus

three more

Three counter responses

three responses

Editing

Very good questions

Three thoughts before the New Year

Is there interest in an updated book on whats missing from ITIL?

In THEORY itSMF represents

What is itSMF for again?

Stewardship and Openness

the itSMF may one day regret their choice of name

As I pondered further on the

V3

It probably would not have been appropriate for the IT Skeptic

personally I agree about

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Book review: "I Think Something is Missing From ITIL" by Ian Clayton, reviewed by the IT Skeptic"