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Insights

Notes from the practice — on service management, governance, audits and the parts of improvement work that nobody puts in the proposal.

September 19, 2026

When the outage is national news: major incident management at Rogers and Optus

Two national telecom outages, sixteen months apart, on two continents. Both took down emergency calling. Both had incident teams who could not talk to each other. Neither failed for want of a runbook — and both are now taught by regulators.

September 5, 2026

AI-native service management: the six Cs, and the governance ITIL 5 now expects of you

ITIL 5 calls itself AI-native and ships a separate AI Governance certification. Behind the vocabulary sits a question every service desk is about to face: when the assistant gives a customer the wrong answer, who is accountable? A Canadian tribunal has already ruled.

July 25, 2026

Discover to Support: ITIL 5’s eight-stage lifecycle, and the stage it forgot

ITIL 5 replaces the six value chain activities with an eight-stage product and service lifecycle. Two of the changes fix genuine defects in ITIL 4. One omission is glaring — and a bank holiday Monday at UK air traffic control shows why the stages you separate determine the failures you can see.

July 11, 2026

ITIL 5 is here. What actually changed — and what didn’t

PeopleCert calls it ITIL (Version 5). The community already calls it ITIL 5. Behind the naming argument sits a more useful question: how much of the framework genuinely moved, and how much of the change is in the certificates rather than the guidance?

June 27, 2026

The ITIL 5 qualification path, and how not to waste the money

Nine modules, four designations, a paid bridge, a paid transition, and a stated plan to retire every ITIL 4 module on 31 December 2027. Here is what the scheme actually contains, what it costs, and the four decisions a training buyer has to make.

June 13, 2026

Product and service management: what ITIL 5’s scope change asks of your operating model

ITIL 5 stops calling itself IT service management and starts calling itself digital product and service management. That is not a marketing tweak. Ten days in December 2022 at Southwest Airlines show exactly what it costs when a critical internal product has no owner.

May 30, 2026

Service continuity is no longer a policy document. In India it is a licence condition

The RBI does not fine banks for IT failure. It stops them acquiring customers. HDFC Bank lost fifteen months of its digital programme; Kotak lost nine and a half months of online onboarding. Both orders read like an audit against the service continuity practice.

May 16, 2026

You cannot protect what you cannot list: configuration and asset management after Equifax and Log4Shell

Equifax's vulnerability scan came back clean because it looked in the wrong directory. Organisations with software bills of materials could not use them to find Log4j. Maersk survived because of a power cut in Ghana. The CMDB is not paperwork.

May 2, 2026

Problem management is the practice everyone funds last. WannaCry shows what that costs

A patch existed. Alerts had been issued twice. The fix was free. And 81 NHS trusts were still disrupted, because nobody had a mechanism to check whether the advice had been followed. Known errors are only useful if somebody owns them.

April 18, 2026

Channel File 291: what CrowdStrike taught every change advisory board

Eight and a half million Windows machines stopped booting because a configuration file expected twenty-one values and got twenty. The defect is interesting. The absence of a staged rollout is the lesson — and it applies to far more of your estate than you think.