So ITIL V3 has finally been launched;. After a number of years constination and debate over what direction it should take, they finally reached agreement or gave up trying to get it and just moved forward. The big changes that are obvious at first glance are;

1) More focus on business integration

2) A lifecycle approach;(meaning continuous improvement amongst other things, but unfortunately to ITIL the focus is on inception)

On the surface, these are good changes. In fact I have been working in my current role for at least 5 years and have always promoted as the ideal way to adopt service management. Time will tell once we read a digest the books and try and apply the added concepts, whether the execution is good.

The big down side is they changed the structure of the documentation, which from what I can tell means V3 is now a complete upgrade to V2 and very little of the existing material is portable. So the industry that has built itself up around the brand of ITIL has a huge amount of potential revenue in training, individual certification and consulting. Its not a incremental addition, its a complete upgrade (cold install perhaps). There is some talk of how to bridge to the V3 certification (in place install if you may); but nothing is confirmed.

As I read the launch material and browse through the book summaries, I wonder if the concept of a service management "best practice" framework is a good open source project. It seems the current books have one or two authors each, whose experience might be somewhat limited in geographical, industry and market exposure. I understand through the itSMF there is a community of knowledge behind these authors, but the formalized structure and the structured release cycle will always limit this level of consultation.

I have always found that every minute I spend not working in this area the process of losing connection with the needs of companies begins. This formalized structure requires professional content contributors who are unable to spend this time in front of the customer. The area of service management is a continually maturing set of process and the development cycle of a centralized organization is perhaps not going to meet the needs of the community. In reality this is essentially the reason why all open source or "participation" events occur. The voice of the majority finds a way to express itself when there is a real or percieved disconnection from between the masters and the population (participation event, opensource, revolution, social unrest are all the same :)