[Alan]

After quite a few people alerted me to this thread and asked me for my take on this discussion, I would like to throw in a few comments.

In order:
The Thatcher Influence; ITSM and Telecoms Initiatives; ITIMF to ITSMF the charter; The Falklands War; The Role of IBM in ITIL; From GITMM to ITIL; The worldwide permeation of ITIL

The Thatcher Influence: Undoubtedly the driving force behind all things British in the eighties and early nineties was Thatcherism. The answers given here are true perspectives from Brian and Ivor as professional civil servants executing on the strategy but the thoughts behind the strategy were absolutely; more effective government, lowering the costs of expenditure (I recall the CCTA managed an £8 billion procurement budget at the time that had to be reduced.) and something that was euphemistically called market testing. The idea behind market testing was promoted as learning from the private sector to improve the public sector. It turned out to be very heavily predisposed towards complete outsourcing. Ask Ivor Evans or Phil Montenaro how fair the market testing was at MOD Logistics.

I doubt anyone has the slides anymore but the best representation of the thoughts behind the strategy that ultimately became ITIL was enshrined in a presentation by Peter Tebby of the Civil Service College at the pre-launch presentation in 1988 or 1989. This presentation was long before the official launch at the Barbican that I was fortunate enough to participate in.

While everything stated by Brian, Ivor and others is true, the winds of change that the CCTA were responding to were blown by Thatcherism. In fact when Ruth Kerry took charge there was to my mind an even greater sense of business acumen introduced in addition to the quality vision that had been John Stewart’s major drive. Certainly when I first met Roy Dibble, he wanted to be famous for contributing to the success of the government policy of the day.

ITSM and Telecoms Initiatives: As far as I know there was never a convergence between the Telecom service management strategy, known as ISM and ITSM or ITIL. The confusion emerged in the USA due to the similarity of terms and the fact that both were introduced at about the same time. ISM was a successful version of ITSM for telco’s that was pushed by executives of AT&T amongst others and while there are similarities, there were no established links. Much like COBIT and ITIL today.

ITIMF to ITSMF the charter. Brian is absolutely correct that he had the charter to create a powerful user community and I was also fortunate to be on the first board and interestingly enough there was a dicey moment when one of the board members and fellow founding brothers of the movement decided to trademark ITIMF for himself (was that Paul DiCarlo???), I can claim some influence on the change to the term ITSMF. I have always spoken of IT Service Management and never of IT Infrastructure Management. Just like I believe in Business Service Levels and not Service Level Agreements. Sometimes one is just stubborn.
I always believed that ITIMF was a limiting title and when we had the opportunity to push the ITISMF chapter in Holland we lobbied hard for the name change. Ivor Evans a close friend and fellow founding brother of the movement was Chairman at the time and through an appropriate meeting of the minds with people like Brian – the deed was quickly done and we have never looked back.


The Falklands War: This anecdote is derived from one of my earlier presentations. It doesn’t relate to the development of ITIL. I actually used it to promote the use of ITIL to create what I then called a Kaleidoscope Infrastructure, something now better named as adaptive infrastructure. The example I used was indeed the MOD findings that the Falklands War had challenged long-held design criteria for their logistics systems (before The Falklands or Malvinas for my Argentinean friends, logistics strategy was about getting 300K people to the German border in 24 hours) After the Falklands this changed and today the concept of rapid deployment forces is commonplace. Actually one of the MOD schemes derived from this analysis was the introduction of standalone logistics systems for army regiments, I believe the system was called Rapier but I do know that it ran on a UNIX system with the ITSM software supplied by Prolin (later acquired by HP and now known as service desk.)

Role of IBM in ITIL: I never heard that story about the IBM bid. It sounds like something IBM would do but not like something the UK government would have been equipped to deal with. Again remember the procurement-centric thinking of the CCTA at that time. What is undoubtedly true is that the thinking from IBM’s ISMA heavily influenced the first ITIL books (Helpdesk, Problem and Change Management). Traditionally there was particular criticism of the helpdesk book for this reason and also the fact that it did not jive with the other later books. In fact had the CCTA not changed course quickly, I doubt that ITIL would have been anything more than an echo of IBM speak. Another lost fact is that Malcolm Fry was actually writing his own version of “ITIL” at the time for Protocol and I actually looked at that when I was General manager at Pink Elephant before encountering ITIL as best practice. With no offence intended towards any of the people who did great works at the CCTA but to my mind, the growth of ITIL to international best practice was really forged in the later books. Brian in particular reached out to experts and thought-leaders from across the sea and in different walks of life like Hans Dithmar, Martin van Kesteren and myself and of course many others whom I know less well. These efforts lead to real assimilation of best practice and the strength of the books today.

From GITMM to ITIL: I don’t doubt that Ivor’s story is accurate but I do know it isn’t the entire story. I first had a telephone conversation with John Stewart in 1988. This was based on an introduction from Ken Wilson, then at Protocol. When I had showed interest in Malcolm’s project, Ken alerted me to a government project: Government Information Management Methodology. I called John Stewart up and he sent me some interesting books with red (??) covers for review. I was excited about everything but the name. Remember my employer at the time; Pink Elephant was interested in best practice for two reasons: One to train our own people and two to use as a standard for our private sector clients.

I remember a meeting with Roy Dibble about our future collaboration. We were attractive to him as we gave credibility to the work because we were a foreign company and also a private sector company who would promote ITIL in The Netherlands. During that meeting we made it very clear to Roy that GITMM wasn’t a marketable product – first of all we explained it wasn’t a methodology, secondly it was an ugly acronym and thirdly we wanted to avoid the word Government as it would hinder its acceptance in the private sector. Roy agreed to consider it and it could well be that from this conversation the conversation that Ivor refers to occurred. On another note, I refuse to take any credit for ITIL. In fact, at the time I thought it barely better than GITMM.