1. CoBit foir IT Governance Management
2. PMI or Prince 2 for Resource Managemenbt
3. Lean Six Sigma for Quality Management
4. ISO17799 for Security Management

provide the operating system for IT to work from going forward. What gets layered on top of that ( like applications on a PC) is what delivers value to the business. IT needs to spend more time getting the IT operating system stabilized (through the introduction of best practice frameworks, methods and standards) in order to prevent the IT blue screens we see so often on our desktops.

Predictably, this has put the traditional ITIL community on their heels, as they are unaccustomed to ITIL in its new, more strategic role. The bottom-up approach hasn’t gone away, but the lifecycle clearly favors a top-down approach with close linkages to strategy and business outcomes. This has caused some confusion and misinformation, but long overdue, as illustratd by blogs like yours.

You may well be correct about my “missing the essence of ITIL v3.” My perceptions are based upon several inputs. First and foremost is what I see in my client base. Second is what I read and hear, including Rich Lemieux’s comment on my Service Management vs. Product Management post, which was actually what prompted today’s post. Third is the scope of ITIL v3 which is focused, as its name implies, on IT Infrastructure. While infastructure is a critical component for enabling higher value activities and capabilities, it is hard to claim that it delivers business value in and of itself. I think this is a sufficiently important idea that I will come back to it in more detail in tomorrow’s post. Thanks again for your enlightening and informative comment!

ITILv3′s ideal of “Service Provider” does not equate to “managed services”. Rather, V3 has made a remarkable shift away from mass production principles where the organization looks inward and focuses on “the one best way”. It no longer takes an approach where IT is managed as administrative routines with internal efficiency and costs as the main criteria.

V3 instead posits that the value which IT seeks to capture resides not in its internal abilities and processes but in its marketplace, in the customer’s perception. Everything else flows backwards from that.

To accomplish this, ITIL incorporates ideas you may recognize from living systems such as systems thinking and value networks, dynamic information flows, and so on. As I read deeper into the v3 material, the lifecycle model itself appears to be a non-linear model based on system dynamics. Rather than encouraging IT to create silos based on the lifecycle capabilities, ITIL encourages the IT shop to see itself as a complex system.

Blog-on!