A great concept but in reality, a ridiculous waste of time and money. Executive management would love the feedback but it's unlikely to get involved (I know, I've tried). Small shops don't have the manpower and can't see a status report satisfying an angry executive when he asks when it will get done. Don't fault IT Managment for trying to connect with business or get executives involved, just don't see it happening.
Latest management headlines from Network World:
When duty calls: IT pros do more with less
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Buzzword, they wish
The term "buzzword" implies a lot more buzz than I've ever detected about ITIL. ITIL's British provenance is the first thing that is going to make U.S. managers unreceptive. The second is the faint odor of ISO 9000 that hangs about it. Too bad, because ITIL could be a really good thing for a lot of organizations, but simply trying to introduce good orderly direction of any kind can be a real challenge. Individual IT departments become principalities vying for power and resources, and unwilling to submit to any kind of systematization that they think might threaten that.
Why Stop at 10
Some more spooks:
11) Management's fear of the alpha geeks and unwillingness to apply business discipline on them.
12) Fear of honest measurements and SLA/OLAs. Interesting how the people who push back on being measured are the same ones who say they don't need no stinking process.
13) Difficulty in establishing a well managed information layer and CMDB in Operations - that sounds like what business people do. We're not in business are we?
13) Operations not understanding their customer and inability to describe what their organization should be doing in a service catalog.
14) Not having business design skills or being accustomed to reengineering type work in Operations.
15) Considering success as a lack of unhappy calls instead of defining real process control metrics and aligning people's incentives to measureable results.
Alpha geeks?
Pencil-protector wearers of the world unite.