[LINK] Is it really that good?!

[Tom Worthington]

On 22/09/12 12:15, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:

> ... Join the club of curmudgeonly skeptics.

Please sign me up for CCS membership.

> ITIL and other such methods came from the physical manufacturing
> world. ... Lean,  Six Sigma are but other techniques ... applying
> such quality management tools to IT operations. ...

Yes, the issue has come up in the course I am doing on university
teaching: how to measure and improve the "Quality"?

> The fundamental flaw in the whole thinking is that IT operations is
> not the same as the production of physical goods. ...

In manufacture you try to refine a repeatable process. In IT and 
academia, you are producing a service, which is never quite repeated.

> As to why there is silence on the interwebs regarding the failings
> of ITIL, I don't know the answer. ...

It is not all bad. There are some common elements to service delivery: 
the people doing it. Systems can be used to monitor and improve people 
skills.

Malaysian universities are attempting to use ISO 9000 Quality Management 
Standards to bring them up to western education standards: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/09/total-quality-management-for-improving.html

> I'm busy trying to highlight the insanity of failed IT projects ...

Professor Shirley Gregor studied failed Australian IT
projects and then went on to see how they could be improved. Curiously 
the Australian government funds training of people in
developing counties on how to do IT better, not in
Australia: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/gregor-sd


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/