So, what's ITIL?

My new favourite sentence starter is "so..."

ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (see Wikipedia)

So what, so boring. Short answer? It's Incident / Problem / Change...

An Incident is when they call your help desk (ITIL=Service Desk). "It's a disaster, I can't get my email!!!"

The resolution to the Incident can be as simple as "restart the mail server". This is pure Service Desk "restore service" or, in the olden days of break/fix; "can you try turning it off and on".
Problem Management is about the holy grail of RCA (Root Cause Analysis) - so why does this keep happening? Because, my dear head-of-service, your Exchange server has 6GB RAM and runs out of memory ever ~7 weeks then it spontaneously reboots.

The Change (remember Incident / Problem / Change) is to add more memory to the Exchange Server. Done deal; Inc/Prob/Chg. Except for a couple of things...
1) Any Change will likely lead to new incidents, hence Inc/Prob/Chng/Inc
2) Root Cause Analysis is the key - without this, you won't move forward

Remember that you need to record failure data and use this as the input to problem management.
That's why the vast majority of organisations do not implement decent problem management.
That's also why the vast majority of organisations keep on fixing the same faults...

So, why?

So this came about because I am writing a hobby app around a new CMDB. New what? Don't worry... I'm just playing...

Anyways, I'm learning a whole load of new technology as I blossom from an amateur to a hobbyist level programmer. In particular, I'm getting to grips with NHibernate (database abstraction), MVC and a fabulous framework for tying it all together at SharpArchitecture from Billy McCafferty.

Stick with me for a trip into the serious unknown...