Welcome back!

Let’s continue chatting about enquiries (requests) and then provide a brief example of an ITIL enquiry in action.

If you look at the ITIL diagrams that the ITSMF (http://www.itsmf.com) assembled, you’ll see 10 ITIL process boxes, a bunch of reports & stuff, plus a CMDB. However, in its current incarnation, ITIL doesn’t have a separate process for Request Management as it does, for instance, with Incident Management.

Perhaps the reason is that requests (or queries) really are implicit throughout the model. In a way, enquiries are the reason that most of the boxes exist in the first place - especially on the Service Delivery side of the model. After all, it should be obvious that IT can’t only be about fixing service outages - IT has to add value by handling customer requests for value-added services! It’s a supply-demand thing.

Here’s one small example from the real world.

A manager who works in one of my client’s IT departments stopped-by my desk this week to ask “what ITIL would say” in response to one of his internal customers, who had approached him with a request. Seems that the customer had asked the manager to modify his incident management software so that the customer could use multiple types of incident closure codes (other that just “incident closed”), and also add another custom field in which they could track a “reason code” for the closure.

Good idea? Not? What would ITIL say? Should we modify the incident management software to satisfy the customer? Or should we leave the program unmodified and think of another way? What does ITIL require in terms of incident closure procedure and nomenclature? What would you have recommended to the manager if you were in my place?

Stay with this blog to find out what happened next!

Thanks for reading — more to come soon.

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