26th April 2013, the
date which could possible go down into Service Management History as capitalization
of ITIL framework. This very day OGC entered into a joint venture agreement
with Capita, an IT outsourcing provider of UK, to form a new company that has
not yet been named. With this the ITIL, PRINCE2 and other IP of OGC would be
owned by this new company which would take the responsibility of commercially
developing these IPs. The new company would be launched in January 2014. The
commercial and other details regarding this venture are available at:
It is interesting that such a
major news for Service Management industry got minimal news coverage outside
UK. Also, I am a bit surprised why other IT giants or organizations like EXIN
have not won this bid because they have a potential to pay much more than
Capita did. Was it that these organizations felt that there would not be a
significant RoI from this deal or was it something else which prevented, barred
or disqualified them from this bid. Only OGC would have an answer to my
question. My opinion is that definitely it is not a case where these
organizations were not interested. Owning IPs from OGC with the likes of
PRINCE2 and ITIL surely make a great business proposition especially when you
get to own the IP, which would take an organization into a different playing
field all together. So RoI and business sense is definitely there. Then how
come Capita, comparatively an unknown company outside of UK, has won this bid?
My opinion is that this being an
election year in UK could have had an influence on decision making. EXIN was a Dutch
company. IBM, Accenture, TCS and the likes are neither British as well. So
though it might have had made more business sense for UK government to go with
these Giants yet it would have had a political fallout on the ruling party.
How Service Management Industry Would Transform Post The Joint Venture
Only future will unfold the eventual
impact of this joint venture. But I believe as far as adoption of ITIL V3
framework is concerned, there would not be any significant impact till a time
the new venture does not come out with a policy to charge royalty for using the
framework, a decision which could possibly lead to the death of ITIL. We might
see some new Service Management framework being released from Open Source networks.
ITIL has grown not simply because
OGC owned and developed it. It happened because many professionals across the
globe, irrespective of their corporate boundaries have contributed to its
evolution into a de-facto framework for IT Service Management.
Now post joint venture era, would
the same level of contribution happen to further evolve ITIL? I do not think
so. On the other hand the new company might hire professionals to write the new
version of ITIL or develop supporting peripheral materials. In both the cases the
acceptance level which ITIL as a framework enjoys today would not remain the
same.
Other factors which could be interesting
would be:
Firstly, the IT service providers
who have a major contribution towards using the certification scheme may decide
not to accept the ITIL certifications. This could happen because the money they
would spend on getting their resources trained or certified would indirectly be
funding their potential competitor.
Secondly, IT service providers and
ITIL Consulting companies would start facing a severe competition from Capita
in the ITIL consulting/implementation space since Capita would go to customers
and claim that they own ITIL and no one can provide a better consulting/implementation
solution than them. This again could be deterrent for such companies to accept
ITIL’s evolution and thus contribute towards an open source Service Management
framework.
Thirdly, the certification bodies
like EXIN, APMG, etc. or ITIL Consulting Companies like Pink Elephant, Quint,
QAI, etc. may decide to come out with their own certification scheme which
could be based on an open source or their proprietary Service Management
framework.
With all possibilities I see a major
decrease in the revenue from ITIL certification and evolution of ITIL
framework. Thus, this joint venture might possible fail on a long term and OGC
would have a stiff competition from a new open source service management
framework.
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