From the Alphabet-Soup Botulism Watch

David Boswell’s Reid Fleming: World’s Toughest Milkman. Click to zoom.

How do you turn a mild-mannered former poetry major and journeyman tech editor into Reed Fleming, world’s toughest underemployed freelance skeptic?

Flood the market with bogus methodologically unsound “research” papers from the VAR-analyst-consulting ecosystem that crown the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) — a U.K. government-developed, TQM-based commercial “IT asset management” methodology — as the revolutionary new “de facto standard” in what we old-timers used to call ERM or ERP.

To add insult to injury, adopt the business model of a carnival sideshow: require me to pony up personal data on a registration page before being able to verify that what you’re billing as a mermaid is not simply a stuffed monkey with a fish tail sewn on.

In the process, never so much as even mention such incumbents as the Service Capability Maturity Model or COBIT, much less provide a side by side comparison with other QoS and IT “governance” benchmarking methods.

Force Colin to have to do extensive research, on his own time — slogging through expired alphabet soup that’s acrawl with redundant acronyms — just to try and glimpse the real story behind so-called Business Service Management and gist it in plain English.

And be sure to have an interested party from the ITIL business ecosystem write the Wikipedia article on the subject.

That’s why it was refreshing to come across The ITIL Skeptic, a blogger who has already set up to red-team the ITIL meme with an asymmetric, day-to-day guerrilla campaign:

We have seen that the ITIL movement has distinct overtones of a fad. What about a cult? A colleague gave me a model that I shall call the Skeptical Maturity Model for Technology Adoption. It has four phases

• Idea
• Product
• Wave
• Religion

His central tenet of course is that as a new innovation moves up the Gartner hype cycle, objectivity goes out the window. That is the central tenet of this blog too.

There ought to be a fifth exit phase to that model. What would it be? [Comments invited].

Disillusionment? Obscurity? Yet another technology layer?

So is ITIL becoming a religion, or at least a cult?

I suspect the answer is that its neither: it’s an information warfare campaign to “dominate the information environment.”

Engineering as buzz marketing tool, in other words, although yes, the similarity with the logic of faith-based initiatives is striking.

See Thom$on $cientific (June 5) for a parallel case study.
I do, however, admire the engineering motto proposed by one marginal commentator on the ITILS blog:

“Doubt is not a very agreeable state but certainty is a ridiculous one” – Voltaire

There you have it: there are a lot more engineers and scientists in this world who have read their world literature than humanists and antihumanists (MBAs) who have read a few engineering manuals. My quest: to arbitrage away this imagination gap.

The white paper from the Tech Republic newswire that got this morning’s outburst rolling? There’s a couple … and where there’s a couple, there’s usually about a million others in the nest or out foraging in your cupboards:

Ball, Eugene, “ITIL: What It Is, and Why You Should Care.” Global Knowledge (September 2005)

and especially

Robert McNeill and Thomas Mendel, Ph.D., “IT Asset Management, ITIL, and The CMDB: Paving The Way For BSM.” Forrester Research (October 2005).

Download the paper to learn why Forrester predicts that BSM initiatives will fail if organizations don’t make the necessary investments in these essential BSM building blocks.

I was thinking of doing a close reading of the two “research” papers, but let me just note a couple of leading indicators of probable bogusness here.

First, let’s look at Eugene Ball, “Ph.D. and ITIL Certified Service Manager.”

Is it so difficult to see that the standards governing the academic mortarboard and those governing the materially interested party and employee might be incompatible and lead to the potential for mortarboard arbitrage?

You can’t wear two hats at the same time without making yourself look ridiculous.

In fact, this hybrid approach is effective neither as research nor as marketing, because in both cases the effective practioner knows she needs to benchmark what she’s selling against the alternatives — rather than trying to sell me on the proposition that no alternatives exist.

In a true ecosystem, there are always alternatives — birds do not have a monopoly on the “flying away to avoid being eaten” business method, for example — and when there no longer are, the first question that comes to mind is this: So who wiped them out, stuffed them, and packed them off to the Museum of Obselescent Tech?

See also The Emperor Has No Clothes: Where is the Evidence for ITIL?

Second, the Forrester paper is bascially founded on FUD strategy that’s all too familiar these days, if you read as deeply in the marketing and PR literature as I do.

The first prong of the appeal to FUD goes like this: “You have no option but to buy the whole stack because relying on the interoperability of components is a deeply risky proposition.”

The second prong of the appeal to FUD — the “de facto standard” argument, where FUD hooks into the infamous 3 E’s strategy — closes the loop on the catch 22: “It would be risky to buy into someone else’s ecosystem because the beasts at the top of the food chain in the ITIL ecosystem are also your customer base’s principal suppliers and consultants.”

More on this as I get a chance. It definitely ties in with a recent general thread in my reading on “private standards, copyright and public law,” but I’m too lazy to write a master’s thesis linking up the six degrees of separation this morning.

And forgive the extra acid in the orange juice this morning: The sight of soldiers armed with submachine guns in my neighborhood subway station tends to agitate me …

The configuration management database architecture ecosystem. Source: Forrester. Click to zoom.

COBIT’s parent organization, by the way, publishes a detailed analysis of all comparable international IT governance standards:

1. COSO
2. ITIL
3. ISO/IEC 17799:2005
4. FIPS PUB 200
5. ISO/IEC TR 13335
6. ISO/IEC 15408:2005/Common Criteria/ITSEC
7. PRINCE2
8. PMBOK
9. TickIT
10. CMMI
11. TOGAF
12. IT Baseline Protection Manual
13. NIST 800-14

That’s what I’m talking about: Aggregrate some info in one place for my learning convenience. Thank you.