It is customary for pundits to end the year by summarizing their predictions. This futurology is an art, seeking the right balance between the shocking and the utterly meaningless. Swept away by this tsunami of blustering badauds and recalling the words of the sage, dulce et decorum desipere in loco, I lay my humble offering before you.
ITIL to be auctioned on Ebay
Conscious of the need to turn a profit, the government of the United Kingdom of England, Wales and some other places has decided to follow the Swiss example of continuing to hold a significant stake in its most valuable assets while allowing the private sector to impose their obviously superior morals and business acumen, required to ensure the perennial value of the stuff.
On the advice of some of the former gurus from Lehman Brothers, Her Majesty’s government will decide that the best way to cash in on ITIL’s value is to tap the world-wide market available via Ebay. Supporting the democratic principles of glasnost and perestroika, anyone will be allowed to make a bid, even without signing an NDA first. Payment via PayPal will be available (with an extended payment plan at LIBOR +3%).
itSMF International to Buy the New York Stock Exchange
It is no secret that itSMF International has been working on strengthening its vision and mission and I am sure that it will have a major surprise in store for all of us. The major issue with itSMF International is that it attempts to support the development of new practices in the area of service management, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in that realm, sharing this information with members in all countries—and this without troubling itself too much with the commercial need to act in a responsible and sustainable way.
Dissatisfied with the non-profit, unsustainable approach that is of benefit to all chapters, irrespective of their wealth or number of members, I predict that itSMF International will try to put its finances on a more sustainable basis. Word has it that the New York Stock Exchange, cash rich and inadequately protected from the marauding sharks of the business world, is threatened by an unfriendly takeover by Kim Il-sung. Mr. Kim has threatened to launch one his Pakistano-North Korean missiles against the august New York institution unless it plays footsy with him. I predict that itSMF International will play the white knight and save the NYSE from a despicable fate. Chapter levies may have to be raised somewhat to finance this operation, but the end result will surely be a guaranteed income.
ITSM Processes to be Replaced by Crowd-Sourcing
Having recently re-read Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (in the Ladino original, to catch some of the poetry missing from its germanophone simulacrum), it has become evident that the process-oriented approach to managing services has been, in reality, a misguided Marxist-Leninist plot to introduce centralized control of services based on a purely rational system.
I predict that this intolerable encroachment on our freedoms and our way of life will be replaced by crowd-sourced management. We will, in the near future, benefit from the power of crowds, as Canetti so cunningly analyzed. Our individual intelligence will no longer be of particular significance. What will count is our ability to blend into the mass, like one worker bee among thousands in the hive. That will be the source of our power.
As a sub-prediction, I foresee that the ITIL qualification program will be radically altered (now that it is no longer in the death-grip of itSMF). Knowledge of terminology, life-cycles and process frameworks will be replaced by dancing schools. Each service management practitioner will have to learn how to do a particular dance that shows the rest of the hive where the honeypot of service management truth is to be found. As these dances go viral (via videos of the dances on YouTube, followed by video responses), we will be inevitably led to the true way to manage services.
Power to the people! Sieg Heil!
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