The PIllars of ITIL: time for OGC's ITIL to grow up or wither

In the early days ITIL was a casual thing: a loose collection of books from a loose collection of experts. Now it is a billion (I guess) dollar industry affecting millions of people. Publishing a few books is not enough any more.

The enormous edifice of ITIL is held up by much more infrastructure than that, and nobody has control. See the IT Skeptic's latest article on ITSMWatch for a review of (most of) the Pillars of ITIL, and the parlous state some of them are in.

OGC needs to step up to the mark and get control of much more of the ITIL domain, or yield to someone who will.


ITIL is just a library of books

ITIL is just a library of books. Great books but books just the same. The IT Bible?

[Edited by the administrator]

That's my point: no it's NOT

That's my point: no it's NOT any more. ITIL is

  • a sea change in the industry
  • a movement: a coming together of people to drive or be part of that change
  • a club, a network
  • a huge industry of certification and trainers and consultants and publishers and websites and...
  • a de-facto standard (even if, unlike COBIT, it was unfortunately not written like a standard)
  • the dominant certification of IT operations people
  • and so on... (read the article)

The trouble is OGC keeps treating it as if it were just a set of books.

The sound of inevitability

The source of energy for all this ITIL change and growth lays not in the heroism of the entrepreneur, but in the nature of knowledge and technology itself.

Knowledge has a cumulative, accelerating quality to it. The more we know, the greater the base of existing knowledge, and the greater the payoff for the next discovery.

This is why an hour of R&D invested in microchips and biotech today has a higher payoff than an hour of R&D invested in steam locomotives and telegraphs in 1900.

The more we invest in knowledge over time, the higher the payoffs. ITIL is part of this virtuous cycle, one in which the more society invests in technology over time, the richer society gets, and the greater the payoffs to further investments in technology. The result is the unbounded ITIL growth you observe.

What happened had to happen, and could happen no other way.

Expectations now run far ahead of the product

PMBOK, SWEBOK, ISOn where n is an integer, or - closer to home - PRINCE2, all tend to be more controlled communities that ITIL. Part of ITIL's charm is its damn-the-torpedoes pragmatic approach: never mind the books are inconsistent, never mind the vendors are running amok, let's publish and just get on with it. But that has gone from charming to quaint to amateurish. Expectations now run far ahead of the product.

Defect or virtue?

I've had the good fortune to review one of the new ITILv3 books. I've also had the good fortune to review the upcoming CCMI-SVC (CMMI for Services).

As I read the CCMI-SVC draft, I thought to myself, "Nicely detailed bullet-lists for practices and subpractices. The process boys are going to love this."

As I reviewed the v3 draft, I thought, "Wow. Insightful, well-researched and somewhat provocative. The process boys are going to hate this."

The foreward contained a tale on emergence and self-optimization. It described a real-life industry that encounters enormous success through a method which appears undisciplined and messy. Common sense argues against such methods.

What alarms you about OGC's approach may, in fact, be a virtue. Why is it, despite the tight controls and deliberate steps, that none of the other frameworks have encountered the same level of success and industry adoption?

Months later, CMMI-SVC sits on my shelf with a layer of dust while I find myself reflecting upon and adapting the v3 ideas.

The ITIL ecosystem is polluted

Fair point and I think the same arguement applies with COBIT.

As a product ITIL is a Good Thing. It works. It is useful. Hell, it is GREAT. And I'm hoping the V3 books will be even better.

What alarms me more is the management of the ecosystem that has sprung up around the books.

Right now parts of the ecosystem are polluted by:

  • secrecy in governance
  • undeclared vested interests
  • questionable trainer practices selling V2 certifications
  • questionable vendor influence
  • failure to adopt some best practice in best practice
  • lack of independent user representation

I could go on: there is a blog in this...

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