ITIL V3 And The Vacuum

I had a brutally long vacation, as you have maybe noticed from the lack of posts here.

Most of the time I did nothing but enjoyed the sun and the sea, and of course, long reading sessions of new V3 ITIL books. First week I read Strategy, Design and Transition books cover to cover, and couldn't remember much after the first reading. Books are NOT dull and boring like the previous version. Most of the material is well written, but the perspective is new and the flavour is of an acquired taste, especially for an old IT dog accustomed to years of process-based approach to Services. So I read some more and parts of it started clicking in place.

A funny thing happened with this ITIL V3 rollout. Seems like things are getting worse before they will get better. Previous V2 story got a huge and powerful dimension with this new service lifecycle aspect. The result is a vacuum window for all animals in the ITIL food chain. Certification organizations and education companies are waiting for new sylabusses and exams and customers are starving for new trainings. OK, maybe good consulatnts can fish somewhat more in these times of uncertainty.

Best we can do is to try to stay positive and wait for things to happen, hoping for the best.

New Qualification Scheme with nice colourfull explanations and doubtful scoring is published, and now we wait for the sylabusses.

ITIL V3 Foundation exams are out. From what I can see, they last for three days instead of the previous two. Judging by the fact that the scope at least doubled in size, and that Foundation level should have 90% pass rate, I doubt that Foundation material will cover anything more then a well described Glossary. Which is fine by me, at least it will make people read some of the books, and pull their heads from the same old process-based holes in the sand (takes one to know one!).

Nice thing to see is that practitioner layers of qualification scheme are finely granulated to enable a phased approach of candidadtes according to their professional preferences. Score enough points, and move up.

And the whole Scheme has an additional vertical layer. Which is OK, given the size of the newly introduced dimensions.

What bothers me most at a present state: it looks that the change of bottom->top to top->bottom approach has lost it's steam somewhere in the middle, and presently there is a missing link to connect old process-based and the new Service Lifecycle perspective. There is no place with systematically defined new processes and modifications to old ones. It would be the starting point for the new people in the business, trying to build some foundations and systematically start to introduce some order to their hectic IT operations. When you start, you do it from the ground up, you do not build things roof-to-basement. Or am I wrong? What do these people have? A set of five books which are difficult to sell to their management. I'm not worried, it's just that this void, the vacuum window will last for some time, and then things are going to click in place eventually.

All we have to do is wait a while. In the meantime, we could do something, like request the additional complementary material. Or even help to create it. Are the itSMF chapters good candidates for the job? What do you think?