An expensive ITIL compliment from an old friend
Posted by Rhett Glauser on Mon, Dec 21, 2009 @ 06:45 PM
So the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), official keepers of ITIL, are now promoting a new ITIL product certification program. Matt Stansberry of TechTarget does a good job covering
some of the nuances of the new certification scheme, and nobody was surprised to see
BMC land the first "ITIL-compliant badge".
BMC loves their certifications. Rob England sums up the yawner on his blog. Glad they could get one from an old buddy this time.
An ITSM tool should meet the unique needs of the IT organization, not what a vendor or a certification group tells IT they need. The entire ITSM industry is indebted to the OGC for developing and promoting ITIL and IT best practices generally. But how useful is a pay-for-play rubber stamp product certification really?
Since ITIL certification is included as a check box item in most customer RFPs for ITSM tools, many vendors and ITSM industry watchers consider product certifications necessary. Frankly, if vendors can't provide their customers a quick and easy way to evaluate the product, third party validation is probably welcome.
Everyone agrees that adopting solid IT process is a good thing, but tools (especially any that claim to work out of the box) are doomed to fail if they don't provide the flexibility required by today's unique IT organizations and cultures. For all of BMC's claims of ITIL 'compliance,' the stodgy fragility of the tool has doomed many implementations, including one for a major energy utility.
For years, IT organizations have been forced to buy technology blind. There was no way for them to know if their new ITSM tool would work as advertised or support their unique requirements. Tool certifications were supposed to take some of the guesswork out of the process.
In fact, as quoted in the TechTarget article, Sharon Taylor said, "Each week, new ITSM products are coming into the marketplace. The challenge for the consumer is understanding which of the products align to the best practices. Unless you understand the product, you don't have a way -- aside from the vendors' marketing claims -- of understanding what it does. Having product assessments against an OGC certification allows a consumer to have confidence that a product has met a basic certified standard. The new OGC certification offers that stamp of quality and conformance. It helps customers wade through the variety of products available in the market."
Five years ago, Sharon was probably right, but a lot has changed in five years. Modern SaaS changes the rules of the game. Anybody can try a live demo instance of Service-now.com right now, with no registration required. You decide if it meets your business' unique ITSM / ITIL process best practices.
In fact, as one of four members of the Service-now.com marketing team, I beg you to please disregard "the vendors' marketing claims.
Are you considering subscribing to Service-now.com? Give us a few minutes and we'll set up a unique demo instance of Service-now.com just for your organization. Many of our customers have taken their demo instance and rolled it into production after deciding to buy. Legacy vendors sell technology that is impossible to legitimately demo or test in the buying cycle. Simply shoving a preconfigured legacy application into a VM does not provide a real-world scenario.
When compared to a tested and working ITSM application, a box of CDs and a "Good Housekeeping" stamp of ITIL certification seems rather inadequate.
All this said, we like the smart folks at Pink Elephant. They offer great consulting and education services, not to mention their events are probably the best in the ITSM industry.
Service-now.com is working through the PinkVerify process as I write this. [UPDATE: Service-now.com is now officially PinkVERIFY certified to support 11 ITIL processes.] We've discovered that this process is consultative. If we can take Pink's feedback and make our product better, that's got to be a good thing for our customers.
Here's the difference between us and our competition. [UPDATE: Rob England contends, and is right, that we weren't the only vendor with the books in front of us from the start.] We had the ITIL books sitting in front of us, plus years of experience in the ITSM industry, as we wrote our first lines of code five years ago. We also allow our customers to try before they buy. Our customers don't need to take our, or anybody else's, word for our ability to support their IT processes.
When (or if) we prove worthy for PinkVerify status, we'll consider it a nice bonus to the consultative process. Honestly, we've done pretty well thus far with about 260 Service-now.com customers who didn't seem to care that our tool wasn't ITIL stamped and approved [at the time].
Regardless, we'll work towards PinkVerify for the box checkers of the world, leaving the tool decision to the actual IT process owners.
At least at the end of the process (since the Pink folks will add value) we expect to have constructive feedback to take back to our developers.
What's your take on all this?
[content originally posted on
6/3/2009]