Rodrigo, you are THE man to talk to about Cloud and self-service catalogue. If Cloud was really "happening' and the landscape was altering and the future was going bang, I'd expect you to have 100,000 requests to talk to you right now from the millions of IT shops around the world. You wound me up enough that I blogged on this http://www.itskeptic.org/few-swallows-cloud-are-not-altering-landscape

Oh please, not the old "all the old rules are gone" argument again. I thought e-commerce, dot.bomb, hedge funds and US real estate would have got that out of our language by now. Cloud will fail. There will be disasters. Companies will crash and possibly the economy will crash, all because Cloud Cowboys ignored basic professional principles of business conduct, especially risk control. Most of all it will be because they thought they could apply a technical solution to a non-technical problem: the poor processes and culture that make them see risk management as an obstacle instead of a safety mechanism.

In defence of we ITILista, let me say: - we aren't anti-automation, or dismissive of automation. Process-geeks understand that you have to fix the process before you automate it, else you'll be accelerating backwards. Automation makes bad process faster. Automation is one of the later stages of refinement. - likewise Change isn't cumbersome. It is about mitigating risk. I don't understand why we would want to drop risk controls. Once you refine your risk management to the point that pre-approval is an acceptable risk, then change gets out of the way (it's called standard change). in both cases it is a question of maturity making automation possible. Until you get to that maturity level, automation is a technical fix to a non-technical problem: bad process. Likewise outsourcing. Every wise head in the industry says fix it BEFORE you outsource it. Cloud is a double whammy: outsourced automation. if you aren't ready to do it then don't. if you are ready, then ITIL won't get in the way - it will help.

Twaddle. Only an unredeemable geek would start with tools and work backwards. "technology has a strong influence on the process". Processes can't be operated by people without technology? Oh dear. I think you are confusing efficiency with effectiveness. Any process can be operated on paper. Most are. Tools just make it faster and safer (sometimes, where the transaction is repeated without variation)