--- title: "ITIL needs to lower its prices: On standards and barriers to entry" date: 2006-03-13T22:33:57Z modified: 2006-03-13T22:33:57Z permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/itil-needs-to-lower-its-prices-on-standards-and-barriers-to-entry/" type: post status: publish excerpt: "" wpid: 544 categories: - Uncategorized timestamp: 2006-03-13T22:33:57Z tags: - Uncategorized --- What is it with “open” standards with significant barriers to entry? Barriers to participation work [against](http://www.ws-i.org/) broad adoption of standards and technology. So what about IT Infrastructure Library ([ITIL](http://www.itil.org.uk/)), a high level model for enabling IT management and operations functions to act as services used by lines-of-business? ITIL is kind of like a set of conversation patterns for operational management functions. To me it self-evidently absurd that Cote, [who wants to write about ITIL and share his knowledge](http://www.redmonk.com/cote/archives/2006/03/low_barries_to.html), is stymied from reading the whole library by a dollar-driven barrier to entry. If Cote is dorky enough to want to read the whole library, that’s his lookout. But isn’t the fact ITIL comes in a bunch of big books a barrier enough, without introducing fees over a hundred bucks for one of them? Who ever reads a bunch of documentation-style writing these days anyway? We want small chunks of relevant content. So that is two barriers to partipation right off the bat- cost and wordlength. The reason this issue is far from academic at the moment is because of the current mismatch between systems management softare vendors selling to ITIL, and the market understanding of what it actually is. **Training and people are essential for ITIL success**. ITIL provides a useful foundation for business IT alignment discussions but it is not not a “how to” guide. There are no shortcuts. It is a not a set of prescriptive guidelines. Note to enterprise buyers- if a software company making a sales call tells you their product is ITIL-certified then cross them off the short-list. Products can not be certified ITIL compliant. People can be ITIL-certified, products can’t. Any decent software vendor will know that and tell you so. Note to vendors and analyst relations people looking to brief RedMonk on offerings that will help with ITIL compliance. Don’t tell us your product is ITIL compliant in a briefing. Its just embarrassing for everyone if we have to have to push back and say it can’t be. I appreciate some authors want to be [paid for their work](http://www.itil.co.uk/refresh.htm). Some may not though. One would think that being the author of one of the ITIL books would be a nice consulting calling card… The fact that ITIL is owned by [UK Office of Government Commerce](http://www.ogc.gov.uk/index.asp?id=2261) could be part of the problem. What is the OGC? > OGC is an independent office of the Treasury and works with public sector organisations to help them improve their efficiency, gain better value for money from their commercial activities and deliver improved success from programmes and projects. Is So why is the OGC charging public and private sector organisations for content. Surely ITIL has outgrown the OGC. It outgrew the public sector, and the UK long ago. Bearing in mind that the UK’s public sector IT delivery track record is so incredibly poor, wouldnt it make sense to offer a set of UK Government-backed guidelines explicitly designed to improve IT delivery free? Its surely high time we created an independent ITIL standards body, which makes core content freely available, and allow commercial models to be built on top of that foundation. ————————————————————————- update: I just read this: > As British Standard 15000 on IT Service Management, which is aligned to ITIL, is being adopted as an international standard, ISO/IEC 20000, future maintenance and development will be by an international working group. OGC and itSMFI will work with this and other standards bodies to maintain alignment between ISO/IEC 20000 and ITIL as both further develop, including vocabulary, functions and processes.