Provoking IT from Good to Great
ITIL Certification is an oxymoron
Mr Nonsense - ITIL Certified
Tweets about ITIL Certification caught my attention today. What the hell does ITIL Certification mean?
First of all, you can’t ITIL certify a system (that’s what COBIT and ISO aim to do), you can only certify an individual. This already gets my BS-ometer tingling because certifying individuals creates gladiators, and gladiators are the enemy of high performance IT: read Free the gladiators!
What value is an ITIL certification then? There are plenty of job adverts that list ITIL as a “skill” (what the?!), and even I’m “ITIL Foundation Certified”, and there’s a whole business around ITIL out there, so it must be really important and worth some noodling.
When you take an ITIL class and sit the ITIL exam, just what are you learning and proving? I sat my first ITIL exam at HP in California. The instructor was quite clear, and correct:
ITIL comes from Britain, which means it is full of strange words like ‘bespoke’, and specific ways of doing things – these are things you might disagree with, but that is the ITIL way so that is what you must learn or fail the certification.
So, ITIL is the skill of learning by rote then? A bit like reading French from a phrasebook and looking puzzled because you don’t really understand the words, nor how the words are put together in a sequence, and when it comes to doing it for real in Paris: you look a complete idiot. Learning by rote is not equal to understanding, I hope you agree.
If ITIL is learning by rote, and the certification just means someone can regurgitate some funny words and draw some boxes that string together, is that valuable? Of course it is, if they are speaking to another person who is regurgitating the same words and drawing boxes that string together. As long as they both understand each other, they don’t have to make sense to anyone else – right?
I don’t think that employers are looking for people who can “learn by rote” when they ask for “ITIL certified” – so what are they looking for, and where does this leave the IT system? Don’t employers want someone to come in and talk their language, understand their system, and have someone bring experience to the table and creativity to solve today’s problems and set the vision and strategy for the future. And surely any methodology that keeps telling itself and its believers to “align with the business” suggests it is not starting from that position to start with? I think ITIL v3 Service Strategy is intended to snuggle up with the business – but have you tried to read the book, never mind act upon it? Not trivial, I can tell you.
So, instead of ITIL certification (let’s call it a Foreign Language Certificate, shall we?) why not award IT people medals of honour for service in the line of duty, battles fought, battles won, but not as a heroic individual but as someone who fought to build a great IT system of people, process and technology. In this brave new world, when potential employers look for staff they don’t ask for “ITIL certified”: instead they look up your career progress (which you’ve been updating and having independently verified instead of doing all those ITIL exams) instead on an independent register. It’s a far out, whacky idea but it just might work.
What’s your answers to these two questions:
- Which do you value most: (a) someone with twenty years experience and demonstrable track record of creating a high-performance IT system, (b) or someone with an ITIL certification? – A or B?
- How much more value does an ITIL certification add to someone with twenty years experience and a demonstrable track record of creating a high-performance IT system? – +1% – +100%?
My answers are (a) and (5%). It’s only 5% for the second answer because the experienced war horse might need to make sense of Mr Nonsense 
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Steve Chambers on 22 July, 2009 at 16:50, 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
ITIL or similar should serve as lingua franca; or as a means of communicating. ITIL foundation certification provides a common language which may then increase overall efficiency.
Think of it in another way – how does one better leverage a set of (n) individuals with diverse backgrounds?
a) With one common language?
b) With (n) languages and no translators or foundational language?
ITIL may not be the best, but it is a start, by not picking a common, third party, means of communication the IT organization effectively decreases its efficiency because it must create and maintain its own language.
Unfortunately, many organizations confuse the means to the end.
As for question 2… Well someone with the 25 years of experience should be able to answer that question in context. In the space of SMB where it is all in house, it may not be as important, but for a larger well established environment where the experience must be leveraged appropriately it may be significantly more important. The single answer (5%) imposes a-priori criteria which does not take into account the realities of the environment (thus in itself imposing another less substantiated framework)
-Lane Inman, Ph.D.
Architect at Large
about 1 year ago
Hey Lane! Great to hear from you! So you’re saying ITIL is better than nothing… it doesn’t remove the need for translation because you always have to translate between ITIL Best Practice and Real Implementation…. but I was talking more about the ITIL certification
about 1 year ago
My answer for 1 is certainly (a) and when it comes to Q2 i think ITIL will add value because:
a) it is after all a set of best practices which you can refer to (not everyone do this) in IT operations.
b) Customers/employers certainly add marks to the ITIL cert (i have a colleague who is ITIL masters certified and sales often leverage this).
As an afterthought if you want implement ISO 20k best way to start is from ITIL books.
Look forward to know what you think about this.
Ramki
about 1 year ago
The Value in ITIL Certification
This may sound strange, before ITIL, I wasn’t convinced that individual certification was worthwhile (with the exception of PMP). So, why am I writing about the value of ITIL certification?
The answer is simple, I’ve seen the results.
Background
Any certification process involves some study followed by demonstration that the person knows something about the material. I am not suggesting the individual is an expert, just that they spent study time and passed the test. In fact, this has been the source of my concern about certification. My problem with most certifications is that it’s possible to pass the test and still not know anything of practical value about the subject matter. I’ve hired people with various vendor certifications only to discover that in the real world, the individual’s capability didn’t match expectations created by certification.
ITIL is different. How? ITIL certification is not about specific job related skills. It doesn’t mean that you know how to program or that you know anything about infrastructure. Instead it says that you’ve learned a common vocabulary and varying levels of application to a service lifecycle.
What is ITIL (at the 100K foot level)?
ITIL is a descriptive framework for good / best practice for Information Technology (IT) organizations to achieve IT Service Management (ITSM). As a consequence, you don’t DO ITIL. ITIL represents an approach, not a do it and forget it one-time project. You adopt ITIL at pain points and as needed in the organization. So there isn’t a one size fits all approach to adoption that works for every organization.
What does ITIL do? On its own, ITIL doesn’t do anything. ITIL is about improving IT service management in a way that integrates customer value and customer outcomes into the development lifecycle. ITIL provides frameworks to allow the IT organization to focus on the customer and also optimize cost and process. One of the by-products of ITIL adoption is better alignment between business and IT. To put it another way, ITIL provides a framework to allow IT organizations to morph from, “I manage IT,” to, “I deliver IT based services in support of the business.” It’s a change from IT as cost center to IT as value center.
So, what’s the value in ITIL certification?
Because ITIL is not proscriptive, the certification process isn’t about doing; it’s about knowing. Adopting ITIL requires that people have a base-level understanding about what ITIL represents for the IT Service Lifecycle. It takes buy-in from every level in the organization, buy-in aided by a reasonable understanding about what ITIL is and what it represents. Make no mistake; ITIL is as much about a cultural shift as it is about good practice and ITSM. That’s another reason certification makes sense. The certification suggests the individual knows something about the vocabulary, about the process, and about the goals for ITIL.
For ITIL adoption to succeed, the people involved in the change need both a common language and a common basis for success in the small iterative and incremental projects that are part of effort. Adopting ITIL involves a learning process as continual improvement is applied. The certification indicates someone is attempting to learn about ITIL; that knowledge is a component of successful ITIL adoption.
Real world example
I mentioned that I’ve seen the practical value of ITIL certification. Here are the details. Early 2005 I was a consultant on a client’s architectural team for a huge project. Without going into specifics, the client decided to outsource a significant portion of the development because the skills and capabilities required were totally outside their core competency. I helped them narrow the list of suspects and select what appeared to be an appropriate outsourcing company.
Fade out 2005, fade in late Summer 2007. The client called because they were at odds with the outsourcing company. The client was thinking about canceling the entire project as a result. It took several months to get behind the finger pointing and really separate symptom from problem to understand what was really happening.
One of the things that surfaced during the investigation to uncover the problem was that ambiguity in language was a contributor. Consider the following: What is a service? Do we mean the service in Service Oriented Architecture, or the service in Software as a Service, or the service in Web service or… Want another example? How do you pronounce this word: Object? Answer: without knowing the part of speech (noun or verb) you don’t know how to pronounce it. In other words, there is a degree of ambiguity in technical language. So the fact that there were communication issues between the two companies should not be a surprise.
By early Fall, 2007 I had just passed my own ITIL V3 Foundation certification. On a whim, I suggested that they spend an incremental amount of money to get the people involved in the communication between the two companies trained and certified in ITIL. The second aspect would be to enforce an ITIL-based vocabulary be used in the communication so that there would be agreed common meaning. The ticket of admission to talking to the other party would be an ITIL V3 Foundation certificate.
As already mentioned, the client was talking about canceling the project with a total spend (internal direct and indirect costs, vendors, partners, etc) for the 2+ years running close to $100 million. So the prospect of spending less then $100 thousand (i.e., less than 0.1 percent) to see if it made a difference was acceptable to all parties.
The result: by the end of first quarter 2008 everyone involved in communications was properly certified. By the end of the second quarter it was clear the project was back on track. It was still behind, but at least the finger pointing was seriously mitigated, and both parties agreed that they were on a successful path to completion. By the end of the 2008 the disagreement and finger pointing were history and the project had made up the lost time.
Is there value in ITIL certification? Both of these companies believe there is. Without ITIL, both sides agree, the project would have been canceled.
Bottom line: ITIL certification doesn’t say you can do anything. It says you have (rudimentary) knowledge of ITIL vocabulary, service lifecycle, and ITIL recommendations for good practice processes. Don’t make it more (or less) than it is.
Sidebar: re: the instructor’s comment. The test is based on the books which are written in English English. So, spelling could be an issue, e.g., centre versus center. Get used to it. You might not agree with what ITIL suggests with respect to good / best practice and that’s OK. If what your organization is doing is working, without problems, continue. However, if there’s a pain point, or some things aren’t working, maybe it might make sense to suspend judgment and give ITIL a try. What I tell my students is this, “You don’t do ITIL; you don’t implement ITIL; ITIL implementations fail. Instead, the approach to adopt is based on understanding the pain points, and applying principles from Continual Service Improvement to the ITIL adoption process.
David Moskowitz
ITIL/ITSM COnsultant and Instructor
Systems Architect
about 1 year ago
Thanks, David – at last, a rebuttal / counter-point from someone-in-the-know.
about 1 year ago
David did a great job of echoing my point – certifying a glossary or dictionary assists. One could use TQM, Six Sigma, or other form of continuous process improvement, but an organization should pick one and go through what ever base line certification to ensure that all have a “common understanding.”
Its not that the translation is not required, its that fewer translations should be required as all understand a common language. In IT – sadly we need fewer “new” ideas and more reuse of “old” ones. ITIL provides one means of doing this; and to my original point – its applicability depends on the environment. (best practice is relative to who it is applied to and what their needs are).