ITIL anyone?

[datagirl]

While browsing the local help-wanteds, I came across a batch of IT-related ads which require ITIL certification.  Did a little research.  It's a UK / international "standard practices" thing.  It might be code for non-US need only apply.  Or it might be that we have several European and Asian companies that now own many of the larger employers in the area.

Here's the home page: http://www.itil-officialsite.com/

I haven't studied this in depth yet.  I wonder if this would be a hoop worth jumping through to gain a leg up in the local market.  (mental image - jumping through hoop with a leg up  )

Anybody here have experience with ITIL?

Regards,
-DG

[Richardk]

It looks like yet another standard. I'd skip it unless your company wants to send you to training. You'll never guess the right mix of what a client wants.

[Origisaurus]

So, is this "skill" quite rare?  What premium is the client prepared to pay for this rarity?

Or, OTOH, has the client already chosen the candidates, and is just doing the compliance paperwork?

Jive turkeys!

[datagirl]

Well, I had never heard of it before.  I didn't know if this was something that was common in other places and just now appearing here.  Richard is probably correct about not being able to guess what a client might want, and Origisaurus makes the point, which I'm also thinking, that they already have a particular person or "type" they are targeting with this requirement.

Anyone else?

Thanks,
-DG

[benali72]

I consulted at a large company in the insurance industry, and they sent a number of their IT managers to get ITIL certification. In the US many people get the cert through the company Pink Elephant. Some of our managers even participated in the Pink Elephant conference. I'm not aware that many other IT organizations use ITIL, though apparently some others must if they're holding a conference on it.

Certification Magazine has an intro article on ITIL here -- http://www.certmag.com/read.php?in=3823

[Richardk]

I checked the site but I still don't buy it.

What are they offering that's new? Why should I care? This reminds me of 'Six sigma', ISO 9000 and others.

[DG9]

Oh boy, another cert.  No, thanks.

[Walter Mitty]

The last course I paid to send myself to was the Oracle DBA course.  I had already been a DBA, but not in Oracle.

Before I went, everybody I talked to said that this was a great idea.  After I returned, the same people said that the cert was worth diddly.


The course was not bad, in terms of what you learn, but very pricey.  Plus it costs you a week of unpaid work. 

[datagirl]

Thanks for all the feedback.

@benali72 - your link was very helpful.  This standard is most useful in very large companies.  My target market is mom and pop businesses.  I suspect if I had it in my credentials, most would say "so what?".  OTOH, since my creds and skillset get farther out-dated with every passing moment, I need to add something "official" to get past the current crop of gatekeepers.

One of my favorite comic strips growing up was a "Peanuts" panel that showed Charlie Brown's sister, Sally, sitting at her school desk with her hand raised to called on.  I don't remember exactly how she phrased it, but she pointed out to the teacher that she had been sitting there for a time and had learned nothing new.  "Since Nature abhors a vacuum, I may even be a little dumber than when I got here."

It would probably be a better use of my time to "learn" something else.

Still interested in your opinions, though.
-DG

[ilconsiglliere]

I was trained in ITIL by P*nk El*phant at my last employer. The test sucked big time after enduring 5 days of droning into my skull. ITIL is all about managing IT as a service and wrapping methods and procedures around it. It seems that it has caught on in financial services particularly insurance. The telecom industry just ignores it along with many other certs (they are into their own nonsense ).

From what I remember from the training it evolved from some govmt agency in the UK that decided to sit down and write a standard set of procedures and docs regarding IT. It eventually was codified into a set of standards that became ITIL. Its VERY popular in the UK and has not set the world on fire anywhere else.

Frankly its just another standard that means nothing though I am starting to see more and more job ads requiring "ITIL Certification". Any sufficiently sized company with an IT infrastructure already has methods and procedures in place relative to managing it. For people such as myself that came out of telecom, they were doing this stuff almost from the beginning of their business.

There is tons of crap about it on the web if you so desire. This is the same gibberish as PMP, CCNA, MCSE and others....

[Richardk]

ITIL is all about managing IT as a service and wrapping methods and procedures around it.

Huh? I can see IT having methods and procedures but treating the department as service like that seems very dehumanizing. People run the department, not machines also I can't see it applying in every case. It's one thing if you have a set of services that you provide but if you also program, debug, research issues, etc I can see it not fitting the mold. Often times "trivial" changes turn out to be huge tasks that were unforeseen. How does that become a method or procedure?

[Walter Mitty]

There's a name for this.  It's called "bureaucracy".  While bureaucracy is a synonym for inefficiency today,  when it first came into vogue it was set forth as a much more efficient means of getting office work done than adhocracy.  "Bureau" is French for "office". 

Is it dehumanizing?  Well, yes, in a sense.  But if you drag me into an office where they survey the damage and they claim "this is uncharted territory",  but their problems are all ones that have been solved at 50 other companies, and there are known methodologies for preventing or reducing their occurrence,  then I'm going to say that incompetence is even more dehumanizing than bureaucracy.

Remember ISO 9000?  (I remembered it as ISO 2000, but my memory must be playing tricks on me).  An awful lot of that was just the codification of how to avoid certain stupid errors.  While there were creative people who took valid exceptions to it,  there were a lot of other people who didn't want to conform because they were software "heroes" and they didn't want an environment that rarely needs "heroes" 

[The Gorn]

There is always a tension between business process and keeping the employees (and everyone else) happy.

Lack of process leads to a mess and ultimately to business failure. Excessive process leads to the subjugation of personal initiative and excellence, and disappointment on the part of those whom the process excludes from a personally satisfying outcome.

I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I am a fan of these "restaurant makeover" TV shows like Kitchen Nightmares, Restaurant Impossible and Bar Rescue. I see exactly the same human patterns play out on the TV "business rescue" shows that I do in software companies. In fact the similarities are strikingly clear by analogy. The business relies on heroics and not on solid planning. The infrastructure is a mess. Disorder and decay afflict the day to day operations. The management is absent but physically present. And anyone within the organization who points any of the obvious problems out is castigated as a loser and a villain to be silenced and to be fired as "necessary".

An interesting relationship between dysfunction and bureaucracy is this: the bureaucracy in place tends to legitimize serious dysfunction, chiefly through role assignments. In other words "we've always done it this way", and the royal "we" is what makes a broken approach OK. A "mere" programmer who discerns that the software development process is broken is in exactly the same position as a "mere" waiter at a bad restaurant who discerns that the expediting process of moving food from the kitchen to the front of the house is not working. Both are considered "too low level" to provide useful feedback.

In such cases, it always requires a crisis and an outside actor to remedy things. Just like shitty software companies, bad restaurants almost always go out of business eventually.

Most of the time process is a benefit to the organization and vastly outweighs the human costs.

Can't have your cake and eat it to. Or you can't have your pudding unless you eat chah meat.

It's one of those.

[ilconsiglliere]

ITIL is the reason that many IT operations departments are now called "Service Delivery". Yeah thanks, can I have a coke with my big mac . Its semantic nonsense. You are delivering service? Service of what?

We had another area called "Architecture and Engineering". This was the area I was in when the laid me off in February. Look here kids, I was a REAL engineer at one point in my life and I can assure you there is no architecting and engineering going on in this area. They design NOTHING, build NOTHING and are basically glorified systems implementation and configuration people. This is NOT engineering.

The new model after the B*ston Consulting Group came in last year was EVERY thing is a SERVICE and EVERYBODY is a CUSTOMER. We are all supposed to become CUSTOMER focused. Yeah thats nice but I thought my coworkers were my PEERS. This is a 10000 person insurance company and they decided to create a "Business CIO" for each line of business along with associated support staff. The purpose of this is to make IT more business "focused".

Whatever, I have had it with the gibberish.

[The Gorn]

EVERY thing is a SERVICE and EVERYBODY is a CUSTOMER.

Just as predicted in 1984, you use language as a tool to debase your opponents and to magnify your own power.

Maybe it's a sort of totalitarianism. IE, in the commie and former commie republics of China and the USSR, the law is loosely written and not really codified in many instances. This allows the party bosses to determine on a case by case basis who to persecute.

So in like manner, by making pablum of English, the management structure is all-powerful. Meaningful instructions and guidelines are impossible to articulate, and perhaps the underlying goal of this is to make all decision making purely arbitrary. So as far as IT is concerned, there are no set rules, guidelines or best practices. So you may be yelled at or disciplined for any reason.