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Free or Open Source ITIL Tools?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the software-searching dept.

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."

12 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Brown nosing. by Seumas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Brown nosing. by platypus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ITIL and similar standards are important. For instance Service Management - "keep shit running" if you prefer - is important since for nearly every company your Service Mgmt. Processes (not Tools, this is just the second step) have to interface to external partners.
      One thing is that therefore, there needs to some kind of commonality. Beginning with a certain size of operations on either side, "just call the IT guy" doesn't cut it anymore. You have Service Level Agreements, first, second, third level support structures etc. etc.
      Another point, believe it or not, there is a huge amount of unnecessary downtime in companies because some guy changes stuff (e.g. firewall or router configs), taking down something he doesn't even know exists, and causes a bunch of unrelated guys chasing the source of the problem.
      This is because they didn't organize their processes in a good way. ITIL gives a blueprint on how you would do is, and hopefully avoids a commitee of theorists in each company reinventing the wheel (just worse) again and again.

  2. Good Luck by kelleher · · Score: 5, Interesting
    All the people I worked with that pushed ITIL spent their time wasting mine in meetings, producing little and scampering around with the latest "cool" vendor. I'd be surprised if someone with an opensource leaning would be taken in by ITIL or if someone taken in by ITIL would produce something opensource. I'm just glad it died a quiet death at my place of employment.

    Before you mod this a troll, go read up on ITIL. On the surface it doesn't look bad, but the extremes the consultants can push it to are ludicrous. And the consultants almost always will...

    1. Re:Good Luck by Seumas · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Good Luck by blincoln · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
    3. Re:Good Luck by duffbeer703 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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
    4. Re:Good Luck by Nik13 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      ///<sig />
  3. Rule for good technical writing by Will_Malverson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Never use an acronym without defining it. Telling someone they can look it up doesn't count.

  4. Misuse of such tools by hackwrench · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  5. ITIL == IT Infrastructure Library by Bravo_Two_Zero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Our new IT ops director came from a place with well-defined practices and policies. We're really just a few steps from the wild, wild west, but with SOx controls. I think he sees ITIL as a Rosetta Stone of processes so that a handful of silos can't hold the business hostage. In that context, I understand it. I can't say I agree with it fully, but I can try to meet him halfway.

    Fortunately, he's not the sort to let consultants come in and manage us. My (barely informed) opinion of ITIL is that it's a lot like butter, sun or beer... it's fine in moderation. Few things work well in unmanaged excess.**

    ** So help me, if I have one more vendor ask me "are you considering server consolidation," I will lose my ever-loving mind.

    --


    Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.

  6. More/alternate info by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Wiki by CXI · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?