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back to article Service Design - ITIL v3

We recently reviewed Service Strategy, the first book in the latest refresh of ITIL – the IT Infrastructure Library. This time, we are looking at Service Design, the next book, which starts to look at the practicalities of integrating IT into the business. Note: not "aligning IT with the business" any more. The world has moved …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Or alternatively...

    ITIL is yet more snake oil by those who know little except how to b*llsh*t.

    Just take one little part of this, that "if you can't measure it you can't manage it and shouldn't even try". Total rubbish and the cause of most IT screwups. Most of the important factors to do with business success are intangible. They are things like 'innovation', 'customer service', 'efficiency'. By their very nature they are not the type of thing you can put a number on - but people who love ITIL will try. They create 'fake' metrics that stand in for the item under consideration. Maybe they will count patents, or survey the customers, or measure some abstract utilisation figure.

    And then it really goes wrong.

    People work to these 'fake' metrics. They optimise, they modify, they cheat. Pretty soon the metrics are way up, and the real performance is way down as the fake metrics drives paradoxical behaviours that are against the businesses best interest.

    In IT that means measures of effectiveness that totally ignore the staff screaming at a system that doesn't help them deliver their job, and an IT staff that actively gets in the way and prevents change. "But we're following our ITIL approved plan and all our metrics are up."

    Save the hundreds of pounds they want for this paperwork jamboree and get a clue instead.

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  2. Tuomo Stauffer
    Gates Horns

    about your comment.

    Hi - I both agree and disagree your comment, it is too simplified. ITIL is great as are SOA, SDLC, XP, agile, etc. Unfortunately for most business they are just words, something to attach to reports. ITIL is very nice framework but there is no fixed model that fits in all cases. And nothing new here, any and all these methods / architectures were used a log time ago, they just didn't have names attached. Weird, it has been known a long time that following some organized way to do things is good for both business and IT as long as they work together and we still need someone to tell us how ?

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  3. David Norfolk
    IT Angle

    Don't bother with metrics?

    Yes, there are a lot of intangibles, but that doesn't mean that pursuing *appropriate* metrics isn't worthwhile...

    Have you noticed that IT has a reputation for delivering Late, Over Budget and Wrong? As it happens, I believe that this is often unfair to IT, and that IT is often blamed when the business doesn't really know what its own business process is - but, without metrics, how do you prove this?

    And, in its unmanaged, chaotic way, craft-IT does often build systems "right" (until they get maintained); the trouble is, they are not always the "right systems" when the business starts to use them... The IT status quo isn't held in universal respect - outside of IT.

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