At CA Expo here in Oz I asked the 200 people in my session who thought they were an ITIL V3 shop and probably 20 or so hands went up sheepishly. Maybe the reason for this is that they have seen what happens to people who put their hands up in response to my questions or maybe they were unsure.
Word out of the latest Gartner conference is that lots of IT organisations are adopting V3. Now for the record, I think they should. But just because I think they should does not mean that they are. So here in Oz, which is a very mature Service Management market, I get mixed feedback about the adoption of V3. When I asked the same question in the Sydney Expo I told some of the people to put their hands down (see what I meant about putting your hand up in my sessions!). So why did I ask them to put their hands down? For the same reason that I do not think there is the ITIL V3 uptake that the analysts are quoting.
And that reason is that if you are just doing Incident, Problem, Change, don’t kid yourself that you are a V3 shop. It is really good that you are doing those things, don’t get me wrong. It is just that IT is so bad at managing expectations and here is another example:
You need to be doing more than the old Service Support processes.
So are the analysts wrong? And if so where are they getting the data? Or are they asking the wrong questions? I think it is a combination of things. I twitter on Service Management (@ITILNinja) and David Ratcliff of Pink Elephant (@pinkerdavid) asked the question about why are we twittering on advanced topics when most people are still crawling? And he is so right.
There are so many shops out there still implementing the SS processes and here I am talking about Service Portfolio Management. If you are struggling with Incident and Change, SPM is fantasyland. But I want people to start thinking about how good fantasyland could be!
And this is how I think you can define yourself as an ITIL V3 shop – you have started to think and plan to eventually get to Peter’s fantasyland and it is a good place!
You are an ITIL V3 shop if you have started to embrace some of the new processes and are talking about a Service Lifecycle. Sorry, not just talking about it but it is starting to become part of the culture. When you start appointing Service owners and Business Relationship Managers that actually talk to the business, not just other parts of IT.
So if an analyst asks you whether you are a V3 shop or not, forget about the pressure for you to say yes and ask yourself how you stack up against some of my basic criteria and also ask yourself whether your CIO talks about this as well.
As I always like to do – if you think you are a V3 shop, leave a comment and tell me why.