While we’re busy enjoying the ITIL rewrite debate, a much bigger issue is looming over the horizon which threatens the fabric of ITSM, writes James West.
Arguing about ITIL is to IT service management what the Great Red Storm is to planet Jupiter; a ceaselessly churning swarm of energy and hot air. Just take a look at Twitter (#ITIL) and blogs from James Finister, Rob England and Stephen Mann to see this theory vividly illustrated.
ITIL supporters and distractors are equally headstrong, passionate and stubborn. On one hand, this is a good thing, because the collective energy and debate they bring have banished the biggest enemy of innovation – apathy. ITIL has been forced to grow and improve to appease its fans and those who criticise it, and we are left with a very active industry forever questioning and attempting to solve problems.
However, there is a flip-side to this activity. Just as the majesty of the Jupiter storm dominates observations of the gas giant, the weight of ITIL can mask a much bigger picture and ecosystem. I’m hesitant to undermine the ITIL debate and its significance (for the record, I think rewriting the books is brave and absolutely correct, as long as the project delivers the publications that should have been there in the first place), but when I consider the problems faced by our industry, I can’t help feeling that the precise wording of a guidebook is not really that important.
What are these problems? Well, there’s cloud computing for one. Microsoft Office365, Google Apps, Chrome web-powered netbooks, iCloud – this is just the beginning. These rich, influential and innovative companies are attempting to simplify computing and its management forever. If we look at it another way, they are trying to commoditise the very thing that ITSM and internal IT departments exists for – delivering seamless IT services.
We like to think that ITSM is more important than that – and of course it is – but when these big brands find the optimal way to package and price IT functions so they become funky, consumer services (business ‘users’ are consumers too – only IT tries to differentiate and split people into the non-existent consumer/end user groups), is ITSM positioned to respond? Does ITSM have the tools and measures in place to prove it is doing a better job than an outsourcer, or a cloud hosting company?
I sense it will take a few years of analysis before we truly understand how devastatingly drastic the changes we are witnessing within enterprise IT are. Tablet computers and smarketphones, and the pain these devices are causing IT departments as they scramble to either lock out or incorporate them into the corporate mix, are ruthlessly exposing limitations to traditional IT delivery.
IT is changing at a pace that no-one can really comprehend. Depending on how it shakes out will define the roll of the internal IT department – and indeed whether there needs to be one at all – for the next ten years. Put into this context, the ITIL debate seems petty and inconsequential.
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I disagree. The debate is not inconsequential – its needed. When we speak to ITIL on these blogs its more a case of the movement behind ITIL that helped set an inappropriate expectation as to how it fits into an ITSM approach. Add to this the quality of the end product and the most recent need to invest the time and money all over again – with no ‘upgrade’ path.
No-one is asking that ITIL stay ‘current’ – whatever that means. On the contrary, we are asking that those who peddle ITIL and promote it as the ONLY reference and source of a definition of ITSM, are held accountable for its gaps and positioning.
Its been 35 years since Scandinavian luminaries in the marketing universe defined service management as a concept and set of methods to manage products that required increasing levels of human interaction.
Yet, IT remains largely ignorant of these sources – why?
No, the debate should continue as long as the ITSM market is handcuffed by one source thinking. Its my responsibility as a consultnat not to knock ITIL per se – but to help “protect an existing or planned investment in ITIL”, and an ITSM approach.
Some good points Ian, thank you.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with debating ITIL, I just think there are more pressing issues to worry about other than the precise wording of the ITIL documents. As you say, we must avoid one source thinking, but isn’t ITIL the one source which the industry has become too obsessed about, and reliant on, for ideas?
Of course Rob, Stephen, Ian and myself are all well aware both of how ITIL relates to ITSM and also of the challenges facing the ITSM world.
The truth is that ITIL is increasingly irrelevant to many of us in our real world lives but there are reasons why I feel we need to talk about this refresh
The first is because there remains a sizeable community for whom ITIL remains the prime reference point. That community makes a considerable investment on the strength of what ITIL says. I believe that community deserves a product that is truly fit for purpose. For that reason I sincerely hope that despite my gripes ITIL 2011 Edition will turn out to be a much improved product.
I also believe that the ITSM industry should practise what we preach, and I don’t believe that version 3 of ITIL or the associated training shows that to be the case.
A point that your post is possibly missing is one that others have failed to see as well. The cloud is not a challenge to ITSM per se, but only to outdated, inflexible thinking about ITSM. Or to put it another way, it is a challenge for ITIL, but not for ITSM.
It’s something of a chicken and egg situation, isn’t it? Has ITSM become too complacent and unreceptive to new trends and ideas because it is too focused on ITIL, or is there another reason? The answer is largely irrelevant, because the challenge remains the same: ensuring that ITSM remains relevant in a cloud/hosted software and consumer IT world. I can’t see how pouring over the wording of the Service Strategy book is going to help solve this.
Realising that we’re a couple of years off the reality James has envisaged here. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see a paper from the owners of ITIL specifically on the relevance of ITIL when the Cloud has taken over, and local IT is no longer responsible for capacity management, network availability, problem management, perhaps even change management, etc., and the Service Desk is reduced to logging and flogging to a support team at Google or some yet-to-be-invented cloud provider. But I don’t expect that anytime soon – after all, we’ve had Outsourcing since before ITIL was invented, and ITIL still hasn’t reacted to that either. It’s time we all accepted the ITIL doesn’t think about IT in strategic terms, but in terms only of limited, local processes. ITIL will in all likelihood let the Cloud pass it by, as it has so many other movements in the IT industry.
Your point about cloud taking control away form internal IT is the most important issue here I think, and I’m not sure it has anything to do with ITIL. ITIL teaches us how to manage IT processes, so how can it be relevant in cases where these processes are managed externally? You can’t blame ITIL for this. However, this is why I think the debate about rewriting the ITIL is a red-herring, if through no fault of its own, ITIL can’t help us address one of the biggest challenges faced by IT departments, should we continue to give it such prominence? http://www.servicedesk360.com/archives/?p=4523