{"id":34,"date":"2006-03-08T17:05:51","date_gmt":"2006-03-09T00:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/wp\/?p=34"},"modified":"2006-03-08T17:05:51","modified_gmt":"2006-03-09T00:05:51","slug":"low-barriers-to-entry-for-itil-100-books-no-free-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2006\/03\/08\/low-barriers-to-entry-for-itil-100-books-no-free-downloads\/","title":{"rendered":"Low Barriers to Entry for ITIL: $100 Books?! No free downloads?!"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I’ve noted before<\/a>, I’ve always had a hard time finding cheap or free ITIL books. Back when I worked at BMC, thanks to Anne Gentle<\/a>, I got my hands on a copy of Service Support<\/i><\/a>, a $109.79 value. It’s an indication of why part of my coverage is systems management when I say that I loved reading that book.<\/p>\n

But $109.79? That’s a little high for even an on-ramp. ITIL to me is an open standard, so it’s damaging to the spread of ITIL to have such high barriers to entry. I can’t imagine that the OSS systems management people we’re starting to talk more and more with (and find more<\/a> and more<\/a> of each day) would find value in shelling out that much money for a book. There’s even higher prices for getting digital versions of the books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pricing Out Your Users<\/h2>\n

The danger for ITIL is this: if the OSS systems management people grow their influence, and there’s no ITIL baked into that software, it’s going to be harder to get companies standardized on the practices in ITIL. Put another way, the long tail often ends up creating it’s own standards when it can’t get or doesn’t like the existing standards: compare Web Services to web services, or even RSS to ATOM.<\/p>\n

It’s not NIH, it’s NBH: No Budget Here.<\/p>\n

Now, you could argue that the OSS systems management crowd will not grow their influence if they don’t cater to ITIL. Indeed, that could turn out to be the case, and it’ll be an interesting theory to test out in our OSS systems management analysis. That would be equally tragic because those folks would then have to spend serious cash to get access to the open standards they needed.<\/p>\n

(In a much more abstract phrasing, this issue is one of RedMonk’s core concerns: bringing more people to the party by lower barriers to entry benefits everyone.)<\/p>\n

Free Downloads<\/h2>\n

Clearly, what I’m saying here is: why can’t I download the complete ITIL books for free after doing a quick search for “free ITIL books”<\/a>? To me, providing free downloads for all the ITIL books seems like the best guarantee for ITIL’s success. That success would benefit everyone in systems management, ’cause ITIL is pure goodness.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer:<\/b> BMC, where Anne works, is a client.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I’ve noted before, I’ve always had a hard time finding cheap or free ITIL books. Back when I worked at BMC, thanks to Anne Gentle, I got my hands on a copy of Service Support, a $109.79 value. It’s an indication of why part of my coverage is systems management when I say that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,19,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing","category-open-source","category-systems-management"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}