Published: October 29 2007, 02:44 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Marvin Waschke

I have been following the reaction to ITIL® v3 with great interest. My own views diverge from most of the public comments I have heard, which is not surprising since I tend to look at IT from a developer's perspective, which differs from that of many ITIL pundits.

The talk is that v3 is on the upward slope of a hype cycle; it is poorly understood but still expected to solve all problems; it is too complicated, so nearly impossible to implement. However, since almost every new IT concept is subjected to these criticisms at some point, I think we need to explore further.

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore points out that there is a great chasm between starry eyed early adopters and the IT pragmatists who actually put technology to work. I place myself in the pragmatist camp. Nevertheless, a developer strives to build products that ride the crest of the hype, but still deliver lasting value to the pragmatic adopters who follow. To accomplish this, you have to study the hype carefully.

Frankly, I have a few scars to show for wrong choices I've made while sifting through the hype to find the golden nuggets--the products that ride the hype crest and go on to deliver lasting value. I once developed a project management application that failed miserably because it relied on a mouse years before mice were standard equipment on PCs. As a result, I am more circumspect about hype and adoption than I was in those days.

Most of what I've read about the reaction to v3 has been concern over its complexity. I do not share that concern. As a matter of fact, one of my personal IT hype warnings is lack of complexity. Whenever I hear someone propose a "simple" solution to IT management, a warning signal fires. While "oversimplification" equals hype, "simplifying" is an admirable goal.  

IT is complex. The challenge is to face that complexity and make it simple to manage. That is what CA means when we say "unify and simplify." To accomplish this, we are leveraging our Unified Service Model. Identifying and managing every aspect of an IT service is the work of many applications interacting in complex ways. Many physical and logical entities, from servers to regulatory documents to technicians all help govern and deliver IT services. To simplify IT enterprise management, we use our IT management technology to tie all those complicated pieces together and present the service clearly and comprehensibly.

Paradoxically, simplifying a complex entity like the IT infrastructure is complicated!

ITIL v3's strength is that it takes a deep look at the complexity of IT and proposes practices that include the entire lifecycle of a service. This lifecycle focus pulls in more moving parts and forces service management practices to become more complex, although the ultimate goal is to simplify managing IT toward favorable business outcomes.

To link the development of an idea for a credit card validation service in a project portfolio with servers in a data center, subscriptions in a service catalog, and incidents at the service desk is a formidable task involving at least a half dozen separate applications. But when all the pieces fit together, the result is creating high value services for the business. The executive who funds a credit card validation project, a technician changing a power supply on a server on which a key validation application runs, and a service catalog recording another subscription to the service are all talking and working from the same service definition.

That is what I call simplicity in complexity and the paradox of ITIL v3.

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