American ITIL

For anyone not familiar with it, ITIL (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of IT service guidelines put out by Britain's Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Like the Beatles back in the 60s, ITIL is a Brit export that's gone global; except that this time it's IT managers that are screaming rather than teenage girls, and they are screaming for very different reasons.

For example, most organizations aren't even measuring the returns on their ITIL investments. In addition, according to BMC Software global best practices director Ken Turbitt, "ITIL is not a methodology for implementing ITSM processes, it does not contain detailed process maps, and...does not, and cannot, provide work instructions."

Some vendors are trying to help. Kinetic Data, for example, provides practical software tools and applications built on BMC Remedy that enable IT to build and implement ITIL-recommended service catalogs fairly quickly, as well as to automatically survey users once requests are fulfilled. The company's Kinetic Request product is a service request management system (SRMS) built on BMC Remedy that is used to build actionable service catalogs (and even fulfill simple requests), and Kinetic Survey is an application for creating and automating user surveys. The whole process works something like this:

Other service catalog applications include newScale (a bit pricey, but broadly functional and a good choice for organizations that don't use BMC Remedy) and BMC itself, though their SRM system has received mixed reviews.

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