Today, we just started our new IT service management project, which involves a new service desk tool and two new processes. We are currently using HP Service Desk 4.5 and have fairly mature incident, problem, configuration and change management in processes. This task is for a large global company, which brings up a few challenges with both tool selection and process implementation. Our goal is to identify our requirements for the new tool and have the requirements approved by the management before the end of the year. Furthermore, we are going to introduce two new processes. Release management, which until now have been a part of change management, and service level management. My part in this project is primarily focused on tool selection and gathering requirements together with the actual implementation and data migration from HP Service Desk 4.5
As a starting point, we expect to look into the following vendors / products.
HP Service Manager 7.1
My primary concern is performance and ensuring customization options are wide enough to support processes which are not ITIL rigid but still ITIL 3 compliant.
Free, open source, PHP Helpdesk Software
You may wonder why a large global company consider an open source product. The answer is simple – no license cost, which easily leaves room for spending a lot more on development. The opensource solution is only a shell and we will develop the actual tool ourselves.
BMC, Remedy
A software solution which includes every aspect of IT Service Management. I you want to play with the heavyweights, you need to take a look at this software package.
The next week or two, my primary task is to identify our current and future needs in service management and our IT department. This is not going to be easy task but is a must if you want to pick the right tool.