If ITIL is the answer, what is the question?

Over the last few years, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has been getting a lot of attention and gaining momentum around the world.  What started in the UK as a set of best-practices for the support industry has become a mature framework for the management of not only IT related support, but for the management of the entire enterprise IT infrastructure. ITIL is a subject that anyone involved in the support industry needs to be aware of, and especially so for vendors such as PRD Software who provide solutions that fit in this space.  Over the years, PRD Software has often been asked about how HelpMaster and ITIL relate. It’s a good question, however what’s been really interesting to hear though, is the context in which the question has been asked.  Sometimes it’s a question that’s just part of a tender document.  Other times the questions may go something like

    "What’s ITIL!?”

    “How much it your ITIL version of the software?”

…or the ever popular …

    “Is your software ITIL compliant?”

 

Regarding this last question, it’s interesting to note the official response from the industry about such a question.  Quoting from the publication “An introductory overview of ITIL” from the itSMF group, page 7 says…

“ITIL provides “best practice” guidelines and architectures to ensure that IT processes are closely aligned to business processes and that IT delivers the correct and appropriate business solution.  ITIL is not a standard, nor is it rules or regulations and therefore neither tools, processes or people can be deemed “ITIL compliant”.  Processes and organizations can be assessed against BS 15000, the IT Service Management standard.  However, neither tools nor individuals can be certified against BS 15000…”

Interesting stuff – no “ITIL compliant” software actually exists!

Trade shows are great source of such questioning.  So much so, that at Australia’s largest annual helpdesk trade show I decided to put the following question to the convention audience.  Writing on a large sheet of paper in a prominent position near the PRD Software booth I wrote the following...

“If ITIL is the answer, what’s the question!?”

It was a topic that got immediate attention…and a lot of varied responses.

 

 

 

So what’s this got to do with HelpMaster?

This week at PRD Software I spent a lot of “brain-storming” time with the principal consultant from one of Australias leading ITSM consulting firms, Solisma.  The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the state of the industry as well as looking at training and consulting opportunities for HelpMaster.  (There are some exciting developments in this area which I’ll be writing about in future postings so stay tuned…).  We also discussed how PRD Software can work toward making HelpMaster compliment the ITIL framework even better than it already does.

There were a lot of good ideas thrown on the table.
The result?

Since coming to market, HelpMaster has always been a competitive product in the helpdesk and service industry marketplace.  Regarding ITIL, HelpMaster has at all times been able to apply and implement the principles of incident and problem management - core features within the ITIL framework.  However, there’s always room for improvement, and no software is ever complete – it’s always a work-in-progress.

As a result of the ideas talked about this week, we’ve got some great ideas for future development regarding HelpMaster and ITIL. Here’s a shortened shortlist.

• Better support for “Priority” codes.  ITIL encourages the concept of having the priority of a call determined via a calculation of both “Urgency” and “Impact”.  Currently HelpMaster does not have any native support for such codes, however it can be achieved via the use of custom fields appearing on the “Custom” tab of a job.  We plan to make this aspect of logging a job intuitive, fast and in-line with the ITIL specifications for specifying the priority of a call.
• Better job linking support.  HelpMaster already supports the linking of jobs to other job, either in a simple bi-directional link, or via a parent-child relationship.  In future releases of HelpMaster we plan to make this whole process a lot easier, as well as a lot more intuitive.
• Better support to link Knowledge Base articles to Jobs.  HelpMaster currently links jobs with Knowledge Base articles via their common use of the Issue classification.  Our plan is to build a system where Knowledge base articles can be explicitly linked to individual jobs and vice-versa.  This will make problem resolution and searching for known work-arounds a lot easier.

 

There are a lot of other ideas, but I’ll just mention these 3 for now.

So what do you think?  Do you agree / disagree with this focus for future development?  What have we missed?  I would love to hear about your HelpMaster / ITIL ideas.  There are a lot of long-time HelpMaster users out there, so it would be good to get some feedback and get some discussion going on where PRD Software should focus their development efforts in the future.  With the release of v8 now imminent, we’re ready to develop, and we’re listening….

Some options for providing feedback are:

    Reply to this blog
    Create a discussion post in our discussion board
    …or email me direct using rod @ prdsoftware.com.au

Best regards,

Rod