The Ghost of ITIL Past

Ivor took Brandon by the hand and led him through the mists of time to an earlier IT world...

..which gave rise to the first problem, because the secure access to the data center meant Brandon couldn't tail gate him..

Once that hurdle had been surmounted they surveyed the scene in front of them.

"Isn't it idyllic to see a place for everything, and everything in it's place?" declared  Ivor, the ghost of ITIL past. "Look at how the Ops Manager rules his tape monkeys, marvel as he refuses admission to any developers carrying arbitrary tapes. His word is law."

Brandon, the once and future auditor, could not help noticing various tapes lying unaccounted for outside of the tape store, or that the tape monkeys appeared to have no idea what they were actually doing.

"Tell me Ivor, what have you brought me here to see?"

"I have brought you so that you might understand there was once a golden age of IT, when we knew and understood our place in the world.. It was a world where the dangerous intellectuals were turned to the right, and became system analysts, whilst those of us who were unworthy turned left and became operators. Of course there were also also those who ignored all the obvious signs and became Sysprogs"

"So what happened to the Sysprogs?" queried Brandon.

"To be quite honest we don't know, we could never be bothered to talk to them at office parties. Anyway, behold IT Narnina!"

"I think you mean Nirvana, but then again... look this is very impressive, that machine there blinking and whirring away must be incredibly powerful.."

"Indeed, behold the might 1Mb disk drive...."

"No sorry, I meant the air conditioning unit over there, but anyway, here we are buried in a silo, what I want to know is what the customers thought about IT in these days."

"They think it is very shy"

"Shy? Are you sure about that?"

"Oh yes,  when I went out to meet the customers they kept telling me how shy it was."

"OK can I just check here, were the customers based in Germany, and were you by any chance a senior MOD civil servant?"

"OK, I might have been."

"And do you think that instead of saying the system is shy, sir*, they might have been saying something else?"

With that the ghost of ITIL past faded away, to be replaced with the ghost of ITIL present.

*German slang for the products of Microsoft.