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Service management by the book

Ticket Takers

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By James Mohr

Providing the necessary IT services to your employees or customers is more than simply logging tickets and keeping track of hardware. We compare several ITIL-compliant help desk packages.

Over the past few years, companies have changed the way they look at IT. Companies now view IT as a service provided from one department to another, or perhaps provided to customers. This has led to a change in the help desk software needed to fulfill these new requirements and typically means implementing some kind of service management software.

To address the complex issues involved, many companies turn to a set of practices used to support the IT processes: The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL covers a wide range of topics and can take years to implement completely for large enterprises. Fortunately, this is not necessary. For a system administrator who simply needs to keep track of a few users' requests, implementing a full-blown ITIL-based system is overkill. But by implementing only those aspects you really need or that provide the greatest immediate gain, you can still take advantage of the benefits.

To determine which elements to implement, it is beneficial to become familiar with the basics of each aspect. A good place to start is "The Introduction to ITIL Service Lifecycle" [1]. This publication gives a great overview of ITIL concepts [2] and, at a cost of about US$ 50, is well worth the investment.

ITIL addresses more than just services, though, so when talking about the concepts, people typically refer to IT Service Management (ITSM). The current version (ITIL v3) is broken into five phases:

1. Service Strategy

2. Service Design

3. Service Transition

4. Service Operation

5. Continual Service Improvement

In the first phase, the service "strategy" is defined, including what the actual services are, how that service is delivered (time, quality), and who is entitled to that service. How much, how fast, and to whom are all characteristics (or

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