On Sunday evening I had the somewhat dubious pleasure of flying from Southampton to Manchester on a British Airways aircraft. I was to drive to Chester ready for a course in ITIL starting on Monday morning.
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is (currently) run by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Means nothing so far, right? How about if I mention Information Technology Service Management (ITSM)? Supported by itSMF, ITIL is supposed to be best practice methods for Service Management for IT departments and companies offering IT Support.
Just take a quick look at the last paragraph. Count the acronyms. Four. And I haven’t even mentioned the actual methods. Rest assured that I am not going to go into ANY depth at all, it’s just not that interesting if you aren’t an IT geek. Actually, it’s not that interesting at all.
I sat for two and a half days listening to a man while he threw more and more and more and more acronyms, information, and acronyms (yep, there were that many – over 500) at the delegates. By lunchtime yesterday I was losing the will to live. A few examples of the meaningless pap that he “taught” us:
You get the idea. The type of Government written bullshit that only Corporations will understand. Here’s one:
The Government (or any public organisation for that matter) is far too fond of the TLA. They should be introduced at some length to the CFPE (Campaign for Plain English!).
The worst part of the course (apart from my disinterest) was that we had to take an exam at the end. Do. Fucking. What? Yup. If I pass I will get a little green pin badge and the right to say I am ITIL Foundation trained on my CV. Yay…
Sounds like BS to me…
;)
I.A.G.A.F.C
(i ain’t got a fuckin clue)
PMSL !!!!!
Paul
Pingback: itil-blog.de » Blog Archiv » ITIL = TMTLA?
Thanks for the link! For those that can’t read German, I have used a translation service to come up with:
An English weblog-author summarizes the first impression of its ITIL-Foundation-course. To make perhaps also once a good opportunity a step back and to consider us for whom (our customers) and for which purpose (Business-IT-Alignment) we ITIL generally operate…
It’s not written by the government – it was written by a consultant hired by the government. A consultant who must have been rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect – government agency management do not have a f*cking clue what they are doing, so they hire consultancy firms to tell them. These consultancy firms make up total bullsh*t and sell it to these managers. The managers do not want to look stupid, so they buy whatever sh*te that gets thrown at them.
They don’t understand it, and so cannot sell it to their staff, so they hire the consultancy company to sell it to their staff for them…
Senior manager = f*cking moron…
Nope, actually (apparently) the concept of ITIL was from a consortium of IT service providers who were looking to improve their customer service.
It was adopted in the UK by OGC and itSMF.
Still – in version 3 (the next version) I’m told it’s much better. There’s only about 200 TLAs…
I don’t have anything witty to say but I laughed so hard at the entry that I couldn’t go away without saying thanks for the laugh.
Since I entered the blogosphere 2 months ago I have been lost in a world of jargon and cryptic abbreviations.
Let me describe what provoked my last BMS attack. I wanted to find a diagram with a legend for the determining what the abbreviations above the text editor typing box meant. I looked high (FAQ). I looked low (WordPress documentation). I looked in every haystack (reams of support forum postings). Finally, just at the point when I was about to lose it completely options bailed me out.
“Oh,” said he, “You mean the Write Post SubPanel Quicktags buttons,” and he gave me the link in WP doumentation. Shortly thereafter this subject appeared in the FAQ indexes under quick tages and html abbreviations. I ask you: Would a newbie be looking for “Write Post SubPanel Quicktags buttons”?
Oh right, what does BMS stand for? It’s bloggers maniacal syndrome, a “newbie” bloggers affliction frequenting leading to hair loss. [Picture her tearing her hair out.]
Pingback: Cornell Finch » Another one for the CV
Pingback: Cornell Finch » ITIL - Sucking me in!