Provoking IT from Good to Great
Is ITIL ‘Gerin Oil’ for IT?
Gerin Oil - good for some, bad for others
Gerin Oil (or Gerinoil to give it it’s scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature.
So wrote Richard Dawkins when he published an article called Gerin Oil.
Is ITIL ‘Gerin Oil’ for IT? Here’s five direct quotes from Richard’s article that suggest there is a corollary:
- “Gerin Oil intoxication can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities of confirmed addicts.” Is this ITIL certification as an entry to a cult?
- “As with other drugs, refined Gerin Oil in low doses is largely harmless, and can serve as a lubricant on social occasions” Are ITIL get-togethers just great for networking and finding that next great consulting contract?
- “Medium doses of Gerin Oil, though not in themselves dangerous, can distort perceptions of reality” Consultants start to apply their “best practices” on reality
- “Gerin Oil in strong doses is hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in the head, or experience visual illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality.” If you live and breathe ITIL, and you’re in the itSMF, then this might be you!
- “Chronic abuse of Geriniol can lead to ‘bad trips’” Did you ITIL project make things worse – is best, best for you?
Dear Reader, If you’re an ITIL advocate and you think I hate ITIL, believe me that’s not true. Instead of seeing this post as a dismissal of ITIL, why not see it as a challenge that you, as an ITIL advocate, can argue coherently against?
I’ve been using ITIL as a tool in virtualization projects since 2004 – but to be honest I’ve found that ITIL has only helped a little bit and hindered much more:
I’m a consultant who uses ITIL to understand organizations on the road to leveraging virtualization to deliver high performance operations: the problem is, when I start talking ITIL they think that I’m from the land of ITIL and suddenly everyone looks away from the project goal of moving towards high performance operations and instead thinks about ITIL compliance: “Hey, here’s a Brit with a strange accent who knows what bespoke means, as well as the difference between Incidents and Problems!”
I have an anti-Gerin Oil mantra: I AM NOT AN ITIL CONSULTANT, I JUST USE IT AS A LANGUAGE, but the flock doesn’t hear me and instead think I’m comparing their operations to the vague “best practice” framework (best? best for who?).
ITIL is like a religion methinks: it has a bible (or a collection) which is restricted publications by the church (the itSMF), and it has an army of self-styled and official priests (consultants) who earn money from “interpreting the bible” for you simple lay people.
I wonder what response this post will receive? I am hoping for lucid counter-arguments or support, but I expect this article might upset ITIL believers: if it does, then it will only confirm my theory.
PS. How come Gene, Kevin and George still do more for business operations in 100 pages of Visible Ops than ITIL v3 does?
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Steve Chambers on 6 September, 2009 at 22:57, 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
I’m inclined to agree that the application of ITIL can be a cult – I said so three years ago
http://www.itskeptic.org/node/17. But I don’t think ITIL the books are any more to blame than the bible is for religion (for the record I’m an atheist).
Personally I get great value applying ITIL principles where appropriate. Like any tool it is as good as the person wielding it.
Visible Ops is a superb description of how to apply ITIL to a totally dysfunctional organisation. Can’t wait for the day when I’m in a situation to apply it. But it doesn’t work for patients with a sore arm, only patients in critical condition.
ITIL is indeed hopeless at describing how to do ITIL, the meta-lifecycle I call it http://www.itskeptic.org/node/376. We need more books like Visible Ops
about 1 year ago
So what works for patients with sore arms if VisOps doesn’t?
about 1 year ago
Hey Jon, maybe Rob would like to answer as it was his point, but I dare to propose an answer: I have worked with organization’s with sore arms, and it usually happens that I go in to work on X, discover the problem is actually Y, and deliver a custom solution that is Z.
This Z is at the other end of the spectrum from “boil the ocean” and has little to do with ITIL -> in 99% of cases it is 2 parts: 1) start doing the right things, and 2) institutionalize those right things. Why do customers need someone from outside to help? A number of reasons I’ve found personally:
1) It’s hard for even the smartest client to be a “prophet in their own land”.
2) Customers can’t answer their own question: how are other organizations doing this?
3) The stats are true: 50-70% of IT work is unplanned firefighting, leaving little time for proactive improvement.
So what’s an example of a sore arm? A common X with virtualization is capacity management, when the real problem is not just that but a Y of change management. The Z in this case is 1) the change + capacity management specifics for virtualization, then 2) how to institutionalize it.
Over to Rob for more colour…