Provoking IT from Good to Great
ITIL v3 Service Operations sullied by HP marketing?
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
I took delivery of the five ITIL v3 books from the itSMF today – the online versions just haven’t been doing it for me, call me old fashioned if you will, but Rob England has the same problem.
I’m currently writing about Unified Event Management as part of a series of articles about integrating Unified Computing Systems into organizations via frameworks like ITIL. I’m not an ITIL fanboy despite, or probably because of, my long exposure to it (since the early part of this millennium), but ITIL’s independent, industry standard language really helps me and my customers make sense of each other.
You know how ITIL is about best practice? Well I’m calling those best practices patterns, and providing real implementations of those patterns for Unified Computing: filling the ITIL gap, you might say.
Even Management is in the ITIL v3 Service Operation manual so that’s the first one I had a look at. Imagine my surprise when, after opening the Introduction I saw a reference to Adaptive Enterprise. Gadzooks! My spider sense triggered the alarms and I though “What’s a HP marketecture term doing in a vendor agnostic, industry best practice guide?”.
I looked back a few pages in the Service Operation manual to the Acknowledgements page and there we have the smoking gun: two out of three of the authors are HP employees. Sigh.
There are many other contributors acknowledged in this book, from many organizations including IBM, Pink Elephant and all the rest, and I’m amazed that none of them picked up on this vendor sales pitch and had it removed. Where’s IBM’s On Demand? Or Cisco’s Unified Computing? Or anyone else’s? Of course, you can’t put them all in, so you shouldn’t put any in.
Unless, of course, Adaptive Enterprise is a new ITIL term and means something universal no matter what the vendor? Nope. Check out this Google query for adaptive enterprise ITIL – no link between them other than HP marketing. I won’t be using Adaptive Enterprise in my work at Cisco, and I doubt that anyone at IBM will be. But this is about more than vendor envy.
On the one hand, you might want to tip your hat to HP and say “Well done on getting your pitch into the industry standard books!”. On the other hand, it might make you think twice about ITIL and maybe, if you are an ITIL Skeptic, confirm your suspicions that ITIL is by the consultants, for the consultants.
Here’s the smoking gun 
The first picture shows the offending marketing term, and the second picture shows the two David’s from HP, listed as authors. Whilst both David’s work for HP, they are also heavily involved with itSMF: Mr Cannon is on the Board of Directors, itSMF USA, and Mr Wheeldon is a Founder Chairman of itSMF International. I’ve sent a message via LinkedIn to both of them asking for their comments.
Update: David Cannon got back to me with some great points, and I’ve invited him to add them to this blog – which he’s done (check out the comments – thanks David!). As always on my blog I’ve added a bit of drama and fun to make an otherwise dry subject a bit more interesting – as David said, the “smoking gun” and photos was a bit “Dealey Plaza”, which means nothing to a Brit :-/ For the record, I don’t doubt both David’s integrity and commitment to their work – I’m a fan, honest!
When did Adaptive Enterprise enter the ITIL lexicon?
Two out of three authors are called David from HP
You might be thinking “Who cares?” but I ask you to stop for a moment and consider ITIL’s greatest purported use: a common language across the IT industry. Thanks to ITIL, we all kind of know and even sometimes agreee at what’s involved with Incident Management, even if your team is called Help Desk and mine is called 1st Line Support. If the ITIL lexicon becomes infected with vendor jargon then it loses one of it’s major positives.
If you don’t believe in ITIL, then I guess you can sleep easy: but for those of us who rely on ITIL as a independent, industry standard communication tool so we can understand the large, complex enterprises that we work with every day, it might diminish ITIL’s credibility as that important independant tool and make life that bit harder.
I wouldn’t want to put Cisco terminology into ITIL: it’s a separate, value-added exercise to use independent ITIL as a tool to help my customers succeed with Unified Computing. That’s why I’m working on a series of articles that add vendor specific (Cisco, EMC, VMware, and others) patterns and implementations to ITIL. I think that’s the best way and we should, if possible, keep ITIL clean and free from vendor-specific phrases and keep the pool we swim in as clean as possible.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Steve Chambers on 21 July, 2009 at 13:15, and is filed under ITIL. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 1 year ago
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the inviting me to respond. Let me put a few things into perspective:
- First, David and I may have both worked for HP at the time the book was written, but this is the first time that we’ve been accused of pushing the HP marketing line through our work on ITIL (especially by people in HP). Both of us have been in the industry for a very long time – predating and (in David’s case) postdating HP. Both of us are on record as taking issue with some of HP’s marketing messages. There was no intention of pushing the HP marketing line.
- Second, you should have noticed that the other terms in the same sentence refer to approaches used by IBM and other major vendors before, or at the time, the book was written. Adaptive Infrastructure was placed last in the list. These terms should all have been capitalized, but regrettably we had no control over the final version of the text in the book. If you look a little further you will notice that I did the same thing on Page 29 (only this time the capital letters made it through). In both cases the text clearly states that these are approaches that have been used, and does not in any way recommend or espouse any one over another
- Third, inclusion of the name of a single proprietary approach in a list of other proprietary approaches does not represent the level of bias that you claim in your blog. The use of terms such as “smoking gun” imply a level of HP Marketing collusion that you simply will not find in this book (smiley face notwithstanding). Now, if we had included a detailed description of the contents of Adaptive Infrastructure – or any other HP collateral – then your blog would be absolutely spot-on. But you haven’t found any of this and you will not, simply because these books were not just written, as you imply, by two HP employees with a hidden agenda. I can assure you that both David and I wrote this book with a strong sense of integrity, and this book was scrutinized on every level by HP competitors and their customers. Anything that remotely resembled an HP bias could not have gone through the gauntlet of those critical eyes – even if David and I had attempted to do so.
- Fourth – Interesting approach to the blog. The last time I saw something like that was at Dealey Plaza
Honestly, a photograph to prove your allegations that two HP people wrote the book? Another to prove that an “offending” marketing term was used? A Twitter campaign? I think you’re protesting a little too much.
Fifth – So what is the complaint, really? That two authors listed a set of proprietary approaches and left some out (some that had not even been announced at the time)? Does that really invalidate the phenomenal work that was done by over 150 people on this book? Does it really mean that the book is no longer relevant to the thousands of people that use it? Does it truly mean that this book is not independent? Does it really put any other vendor at a disadvantage? Here’s what other service providers are doing regarding ITIL: Some ignore it (which is fine, it’s best practice not an authoritative standard); snipe at it (at least they’re reading it); or else they make it their own, build on it, improve on it – It looks like that’s what you’re starting to do and I congratulate you for it – stay the course, but go easy on the conspiracy theories!
about 1 year ago
Awesomely fast response, David, very much appreciated – I’m glad you got the humour in this, and drama is essential in any blog! I take your points on your integrity and no hidden agenda, which I was less interested in than vendor stuff getting into ITIL best practice – enough people (including me) are wary about ITIL being “by and for the vendors” which explains its rather patchy success, perhaps? I’m going to finish reading through the Service Operations book tonight and no doubt will have more comical japes planned, so watch this space