Found that the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education offers ITIL certificate courses
Over at the epr4it blog, there’s a post about the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education’s ITIL professional certifications offering. It’s great to see a university team up with industry experts to offer practical education and certification. It’s accredited by Information Systems Examination Board (ISEB), which is the primary ITIL accreditation body. The University of Minnesota also has an ITIL Resources page with four podcasts and a few papers that look informative and helpful.
The most recent entry on erp4it, ITIL: process or function, describes a concern with a disconnect between business process/service management and ITIL. He references a thread on the dm-discuss Yahoo Group that talks about functions and processes and I was especially intrigued by the idea that you should reuse processes across several functions. Yes, that makes sense. One good example is the process of adding customers to your IT systems. While it might cross functional groups, such as sales management and customer care, which may not even be in the same organization, it’s important to reuse the same process for consistency and also to save time and effort. I think that the examples given help show the connection between business services (customer tracking) and IT processes (warehousing the customer information). While some of the discussion is really about semantics, there’s a need to make connections between ITIL and business needs, whether they’re called processes, functions, or services. Those connections can’t always be made by vendors, due to the unique way each business runs their business, and due to the fact that a function can reside across organizations in a company. As you probably know well, there’s no easy answer when you start to document processes. When the question is as complex as the ones you’d run into while defining functions and processes, the answer is nearly always “It depends.” In grad school we called that our classic graduate student answer.
Whew! And I thought the tech writers had deep semantic discussions about the meaning of different words! We can’t compare to these ITIL and data management discussions. What do you think? Is there a disconnect between ITIL and the goals of running a business, or do you see the connections that we’re making with the Routes To Value message, even if we can’t describe for you how your company’s organizational structure and functional areas work? My hope is that we’re letting those who know the business best implement what makes sense for your business.