And here it comes again: a long discussion on LinkedIn on the mapping of practice-based frameworks. Meaningless. Waste of time. A toy for consultants. And never a conclusion.

There’s no dispute on the value of those practice-based frameworks (in this case ITIL4 and COBIT and IT4IT). They all provide valuable inspiration. But the idea that mapping these frameworks would ever deliver anything but just another framework is quite naive.

And yes – it will keep the consultant off the streets, as they will always have some new details to ignorant customers, or some new technologies to incorporate in the framework. But it never delivers a sustainable solution.

The fallacy here is that this mapping only involves two derivatives. And mapping of a derivative is only meaningful if you map it to a source. Mapping 2 derivatives therefore is only meaningful if you map these to the same source.

The whole exercise of mapping ITIL4 to ITIL v3 or to COBIT or to IT4IT or to any other practice-based framework is therefore a waste of time – or a toy for consultants. Have you ever seen a sustainable solution that resulted from such a mapping? I haven’t… it only delivered another framework….

The most revealing comment in the LinkedIn discussion that caught my eye was this one:

“It’s complicated 😉 “

And that’s the only conclusion that I’ve ever seen from this kind of mapping.