ITIL, a "BIG" thing.....

ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library. Over recent years in particular it's become a "BIG" thing in the world of IT. There's nothing particularly amazing about ITIL, it's a framework, a set of guidelines if you like that cover every crucial aspect of IT. I've been lucky enough to work at an organisation that's made a concerted effort to introduce ITIL in some of their key (service) areas. I'm sure it will look great for companies to go down the ITIL route and get the associated BS and ISO badges so they've got something to show to their clients.

However...... Yes, there's always a "But" or a "However" isn't there?

The reasons that organisations like ITIL is that it encourages a focus on customer service. You have to question WTF these places have been doing until now? How did they stay in business, often for years if not decades, if they weren't giving their customers an adequate level of service? Perhaps it's just spin once more to make it possible for them to be part of the band waggon. In my personal experience it certainly feels like it. More than that it seems to provide a certain tier of managers with the ability to congratulate themselves on "Improving customer service". More it seems to be a way to set goals and targets that these same managers can then tick off so that they're able to "earn" their annual bonus. More than this it seems to be a great way to divert money from employing staff to do work, the work that needs to be done to provide the customer service that is the goal of applying the ITIL framework in the first instance.

When things are being so badly managed at a high enough level you have no choice but to wonder what these "managers" are being told to get them to make these decisions. Within the subset of ITIL that deals with the service aspects there are Incident, Problem, Configuration, Asset, Change and Capacity management. All of these are quite closely interwoven, and particularly some of the key information here is the Asset and Configuration data. After all, how do you manage a change if you don't know what you're starting from? How do you get to the route cause of a problem or incident if you don't have detailed information of the system that's failed? How can you plan to increase the capacity of a device when you don't know what its current capacity is? Well those same managers that decided that they needed to jump on the band waggon have in their infinite wisdom decided that all these streams can exist without the fundamental asset and configuration data. Of course having goal posts that are in a constant state of flux always helps when you're implementing something as complex as a configuration database. The data that should be in this CMDB is constantly being changed by the processes that should be dependent on the CMDB. End result? Whether this CMDB is ever fit for release is open to question. Whether the CMDB and Asset databases will actually contain the clean data that they should also appears to be open to question......

It is unlikely that I will still be in a position to know the final answers to these questions. The organisation will continue to stumble on its way, and their customers will continue to accept the service provided, probably because they've never actually had a decent level of service. ITIL is a way to get the organisation to deliver what it should have always delivered, let's see if they can make it happen......

WTF have I been!!!?

Well I don't know what's happened since I last bothered to post something here, it doesn't feel like much has but it's been hectic enough that I've not found the time to write so there's got to be something.

Ah yes..... Everyone one's favourite cheap and Cheerful airline. A long week-end trip to the French pryrennes, started well enough. Check in, boarding, take-off, all fine.
As is normal on these flights I dozed off as there's nothing worth being awake for. The quality of food is appalling and over priced and there's not much else on offer worth contemplating.
As I lay somewhere in a half doze I heard the captain come over the tanoy. He sounded calm as ever but the message wasn't great.

Destination airport closed due to an incident involving another aeroplane.
Destination airport two closed due to snow.
We'll shortly be landing in Bergerac. Well for all you older UK based folk who thought it was just a TV show from the 80s I'd like to inform you that the place really does exist. Those wonderful chaps at Google Maps inform me that it's about 218 km from our original desitnation, Pau. It turned out to be a little further for us as you may read below.

So there we all were sat on a plane on a runway in a small provincial airport wondering what the heck was going to happen, the announcements soon started to come through, I won't bother putting the delays in:

• We're getting our agent on the ground to try and organise coaches (I almost laughed out loud at that one).
• We've been unable to organise coaches for you, if you wish to disembark to continue your onward journey it will be without any further assistance from us, if you wish to remain on the aeroplane we will be heading back to Stanstead where we will see what we can do for you.

Being somewhat cynical I could well imagine what "see what we can do for you" entailed, a voucher to the value of the outbound flight and you would lose the value of the return flight you couldn't make......
Needless to say we soldiered on. Now going back to that 218 km. Well the problem here is that that's by road, quite direct. We had no choice but to get the train. This meant heading west (instead of pretty much south) to Bourdeaux (please avoid eating near the train station, the wine we had was crap, a poor irony in the town that shares its name with such a well know variety).

All in all things got off to a poor start, and rather than being at our destination by around 13:00 we eventually arrived just after 01:00. Still we found a way to entertain ourselves and we all knew that should anything go wrong Ryan Air would abandon us, hell how could they afford not to???