Thoughts on ITIL

January 22, 2007

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Thoughts on ITIL

Those who are confusing it with asset management

Those who are deliberately misrepresenting asset management as configuration management

Those who think it is hopelessly complex

A fifth implicit school of thought he mentions is "those of us who were interested had sussed completely by December 31st 1999 at the latest or face possible operational surprises the following day," implying that config is just not that big a deal. I beg to differ. I am aware of a lot of organizations that got through Y2K without figuring out configuration management; in some cases they did crash inventories but that is not configuration management. I am not aware of any organizations or consultancies who have configuration management in the ITIL sense completely operationalized, except perhaps some telecommunications providers. I lay the blame for this to a large extent at the feet of the ITIL v2 authors of the Configuration Management chapter, who in that chapter presented a uselessly high level and abstract set of activities and objectives. Consultants and vendors trying to make sense of that mess have had quite limited success to date, judging by the available industry literature and case studies I've seen - quite a large number now, after five years of trying to make sense of the problem. I also would propose a more useful set of categories re: configuration management viewpoints:

Those who are focused on element configuration management (provisioning, parameters, drift control)

Those who are focused on enterprise configuration management (inventories and dependencies)

Those who are focused on software configuration management

Most people get that software config is its own beast, but the

APMG, EXIN, & ISEB politics

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