More on AXELOS

I’ve been a bit worried about the “privatisation of ITIL” (see here), now branded AXELOS, but my concerns are lessening somewhat. There’s an hour of Q&A from a BCS Service Management Specialist Group event with AXELOS here; and (since I’m always concerned about people facing overlapping standards and doing the work twice over), there’s an interesting paper (PDF) relating ITIL to the architecture standard, TOGAF, here.

The point about frameworks and standards is that they must be useful – in a mature organisation, there are no rewards just from getting the badge (although I’m sure there are also dysfunctional organisations where getting the badge is the only safe part of the process; where actually trying to “do it” is doomed to failure). So, you ought to be able “do things right” and map your proven good practice into the requirements of one or more standards schemes, if you need formal compliance for business reasons, with little extra work. And, with any effort put into, say, ITIL conformance, reused for, say, TOGAF – where this is appropriate.

Well, that’s an objective for a journey towards standards-based  “good governance”, anyway – a jouney  that can deliver real value to a well-governed organisation.