Excelpoint Ltd

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is one of the world's defacto standards for IT service management.  Essentially, ITIL represents a set of best practices for managing the processes required to effectively manage the delivery of IT support and services.  The processes that are defined in ITIL are designed to drive a specific business function.

Typically ITIL would cover disciplines such as:

• Incident management
• Problem management
• Change management
• Release management
• Configuration management
• Service Desk, etc.

In the past, many organisations have not drawn a distinction between Incident management and Problem management - and in fact some personnel would use the terms for incidents and problems interchangably.  But under ITIL, the roles that incidents and problems play differ.

Under ITIL, an incident will remain active only until the underlying service is restored. In contrast, a problem will continue to be active until a permanent fix or acceptable workaround has been found.  This is because the objective of Problem management is to diagnose the root cause of incidents.  In other words, there is a clearly defined relationship between these processes.

If you have a requirement to implement an IT Service Management (ITSM) system based on ITIL best practises, you can configure EIM to implement the processes required by ITIL.  Whether this is to handle Change management, Incident management, Problem management, or any other type of process.

Here's an example of a typical "Add" screen, for adding a record to the database for an incident on an ITSM system (click to enlarge):

An ITSM / ITIL based solution with EIM can provide you with:

• Integrated processes, based on ITIL best practise
• Automation of ITIL processes
• An auditable management process
• Handling of the complex relationships that can exist between processes
• Configuration, without the need to program (code)
• Easy to use, point and click screens to perform the configuration
• The ability to define unlimited processes, with complex interactions and workflow
• Lower administration costs, with a web broswer based solution and a system that is so flexible, that it can be reconfigured to meet your changing business needs