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Free or Open Source ITIL Tools?
alister writes "Like a lot of people, I've completed an ITIL (what's that?) Foundation Certificate and am looking to put it into practice. Picking the right tool for an ITIL implementation makes life a lot easier, but I can't find many around. I'm wondering if there are any free or open source software that helps an ITIL implementation, or if not, recommendations on a tool for a medium-sized (40 IT staff, 1200 users) organisation. There's a lot of software out there, but most of it is designed for organisations with hundreds of IT staff... and priced accordingly."
ITIL, Six-Sigma, and PMBOK are all tools. Unfortunately they are also words that can be used on the uninformed into thinking something else is of value by virtue of its association with one of the above.
Basically the pushers and consultants were committing an association fallacy.
Agreed.
A few years ago at work they started a big push to ITIL-ize and CMM-ify everything. From my perspective, nothing has changed except I have to fill out a bunch of absolutely useless paperwork to do anything, and every once in awhile I have to log into the vile abomination known as PVCS Dimensions.
It doesn't seem to be about actually *improving* anything - e.g. making it less likely that mistakes will happen - just about making it *appear* like it has by producing a bunch of electronic paperwork that no one reads.
The tools you use are less important than how you use them. Everything I've seen of ITIL makes me think that its goal is to try and change the tools, not the thought process behind what they're being used for.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You can also get some sort of overview at http://www.itil-itsm-world.com, though a lot of the "meat" requires you to purchase their documents.
I started reading the overview (work-related), and let me just say it's one of the BEST somnambulents around.
Having dodged the ISO9001 bullet, and having been through the throes of CMM (before there was a CMMi), I can completely understand the skepticism that ITIL's being greeted with around here. Like anything else of this ilk, it's really really easy to go overboard to the point where it's useless. However, I'm hopeful I can reign in my manager and his boss to the point where we take the good (like examining what we currently do, and putting effort into what we should but don't), while avoiding the bad (like months of meetings everyone sleeps through and paperwork that no one ever reads).
The fact of the matter is that the higher-ups are hearing more and more about ITIL, and so it WILL eventually be coming down the pipe to those of us that will have to implement or live with it. And even though there's currently no free (beer/speech) or open source software that does everything, a lot of tools out there already do support at least some aspects of ITIL. The trick is to know how to tie them together, or at least use each for those aspects of ITIL to which they're suited.