Stephen,
Well stated article of the current state of the realm. My take involves decomposing the parts and understanding their trajectories. ITIL in its initial vision was a great idea and set down very common sense suggestions based on years of practice of the things one needs to do if you want to manage an infrastructure and its services to a business. I have always thought of it in the context of "So you've been appointed to manage an IT infrastructure. Here is what you need to know." The funny thing about ITIL is that it sat there for many years somewhat ignored. Then IT management software vendors latched onto it to help impress customers with why they needed to buy their products. Merely another spur for sales. After that, the IT training community kicked in with training courses and certification paths. These training people live in their own world and to me, have little or no value add to practice. You just pay someone a few thousand bucks and they tell you what's in the books. Its just a business model, and ultimately just background noise to actual practice. Certification means no more than you know what the books contain.
Ultimately nothing replaces real world experience. Despite the fact that some companies think they can replace experience with certifications, we all know that approach fails.
Another interesting fact is that the software vendors in this space really have no concept of best practices for management with their own tools. I have always found the advancement rate of tools in this space to be horrendously slow. As practitioners, we need to be more demanding on the vendors to provide functionality that actually helps us manage diverse, heterogeneous environments more effectively, particularly in providing higher level ease of use and business linkage.
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