Many service provider organizations have
turned to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) for guidance to
help them deliver and support their services. Although ITIL®
provides useful guidelines; it does not actually provide the service management processes. Service
providers are still expected to define the processes themselves. They normally do
this with the help of consultants.
The service management processes alone are not enough, however. The people who are expected to
follow the processes also require detailed work instructions behind the processes.
Lastly, although ITIL® does provide some guidelines for service
management applications, it (rightfully) does not provide the tool settings. This means that after
a service provider organization has defined its service management processes, it still needs to
find an application to support these processes. Today, nearly all service management applications
claim to support ITIL® and work out-of-the-box, but in
reality it normally takes between 2 weeks and 4 months to configure a service management
application so that it can support the processes that a service provider organization has
defined. |