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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."
I like people who do things and get things done.
I despise people who spend all of their time developing, re-developing, refining or recreating standards, policies, mission statements, or anything else. There is so much money wasted on a lot of silly organizational ISO adherance and Six Sigma crap that people would be just better implementing a policy of "get shit done and do it right". Besides, as soon as you're done implementing... whatever... some other brown noser will want to make a name for himself within the organization by tearing down the current/last strategy and creating his own. It's what they do.
Never use an acronym without defining it. Telling someone they can look it up doesn't count.
You'll probably still get modded as a troll.
There are people who make up for lack of skills and competance by basing their entire careers around starting company initiatives to adhere to something or other. Employees laugh and get frustrated that the process and policies and standards the last brown-noser made them spend days and hours and dollars learning and testing on last year is being replaced by yet another new one (and a new set of tools again) by yet another new brown-noser this year - and the full knowledge that, come next year, they'll be bending to the whim of yet another brown noser trying to make a name in the company with his higher-ups by establishing yet another set.
Its like anything else... in the right hands, any tool can fuck up its intended task.
ITIL is an interesting way of running a good IT shop; you'll probably find that a good IT department runs ITIL-like processes without the high dollar consultants or outrageous software implementations.
IT managers would get alot of value out of reading and understanding applicable parts of ITIL instead of paying some goofball consultant $200/hr to make work for the staff.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Same here... We were using a simple web app I had made ages ago but that still served the purpose well. It had all the customer/trouble ticket info, priorities, deadlines, etc - just nothing like escalation and stuff we never have used to this day, even with our ITIL solutions...
...
We've installed, tested and have been demo'ed various ITIL solutions, each uglier than each other. In general, the more features they had [that we didn't need], the uglier, clunkier and bloated the interface became. I remember one heavy Java web app that only worked with IE and had all kinds of frames with scrollers in both directions and no means of navigating it that made any sense... After an hour of watching them do stuff, I still had no f'n idea what was where or any of the basics (it was so bad that we're still laughing at it as of today). I has been rather time consuming to find the app, and even the one we have now isn't exactly great IMHO (we ended up with Remedy - it was pretty much forced onto us). As part of this test process, we've tried just about anything we could find on the web - including open source stuff from sourceforge (or anything that ressembled it), and we didn't find anything really outstanding (much less anything using the ITIL model with customizations or anything like that).
Now we pretty much have to turn away users coming for quick help (90% of the problems) and tell them to call the helpdesk instead. It's frustrating to them to have to call unecessarily for something trivial, and it is also somewhat frustrating to us. I'd much rather take care of it right now than wait till they call the helpdesk, that a trouble ticket is created and everything (sometimes it takes well over an hour before I hear from that person again, if they even bother at all).
All this in the name of being able to analyze all the stuff we're forced to type. You never know, printers running out of toner and such could be something common, and this precious data will enable them to identify these common things (funny how nothing's ever been identified like that so far).
The only good thing I've seen about this is sometimes a work order tends to be delayed for some reason (lazyness or otherwise), and this may force you to act on it sooner, but overal, 99.9% of the time it's just annoying and useless overhead. It's costed us many, many thousands in licenses, and we had to hire people to man the helpdesk, get some workstations for them and somewhere to work (office space, furniture, etc). We're not one bit more productive than before, tickets don't generally speaking get handled faster, people aren't one bit happier about support, managers aren't happier,
At some point they had managed to make me believe it would be a good thing, but so far it still only has been a pain in the butt.
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Now that a few posts have better describe what you are asking for (a documentation library), can't you just use a wiki? Does this magical ITIL acronym require something more complex to match it's buzzword nature?