ITIL Compliance

ITIL was defined by the UK government as a framework of best practice approaches intended to facilitate the delivery of high quality information technology (IT) services.

It is no coincidence that EnterpriseWizard provides the industry's leading ITIL solution since the system architecture and functionality set were designed around the ITIL framework. Our CEO and founder is from the UK and ITIL requirements the cornerstone of the initial product design. Lets take an example from the hundreds of pages of text contained in the official ITIL documents:

The problem management process is intended to reduce the number and severity of incidents and problems on the business, and report it in documentation to be available for the first-line and second line of the help desk. The proactive process identifies and resolves problems before incidents occur. These activities are:



• Trend analysis;
• Targeting support action;
• Providing information to the organisation.

"Trend analysis" is the best-defined and most demanding of these requirements so we will focus on that. It refers to the ability to see the value of a given item at selected points in the past and hence judge the "trend". This is a native chart type in EnterpriseWizard and is supported on the back end by the History functionality which provides the ability to show snap shots of the values of any field or set of fields at any time-slice in the past. In brief, it is fully supported at the core of the system.

Even though support for Trend Analysis was built into the initial system design, it still represents several man-decades of effort and would have been much harder to glue it onto an existing framework. So, it is not surprising that, like many other components of the ITIL framework, it is not fully supported in systems that tried to add ITIL support to existing products.

That said, ITIL is a set of best practices, not a standard and if a system allows the admin to create, even through a time-consuming and manual process, a single trend chart for a single field, it can claim to adhere to ITIL. Comparing such a system to EnterpriseWizard is like comparing a Yugo to a Rolls-Royce, but they are both cars.

It is worth noting that no product can formally claim to be ITIL Certified since acccreditation is given to individuals, not companies or products and saying that a product is "ITIL Certified" makes about as much sense as saying that it has a medical degree.

This has not prevented some organizations from setting themselves up to to do "ITIL Product Certifications", but as mentioned above, there are no formal standards for such certification and these organizations are just commercial enterprises that operate without the authorization, backing or certification of the UK government. They are perfectly within their rights to issue glossy certificates to those companies that are desperate enough to pay for them, but they have no more formal authority to do so than your grandmother.