For years, IT Service Management customers have been heavily into customizing the software they use for Incident Management, Problem Management and the whole ITIL process portfolio. The reason? Because these implementations have to a large extent been driven by a set of "ideal" process definitions, developed by external or in-house consultants, and the desire to 100% match the tool to the process. And also because these tools have traditionally been very "customization friendly", some of them almost being generic workflow development toolsets rather than solutions.
This heavy use of customization has had several consequences that over time have become burdens rather than advantages for the customers:
- The ongoing maintenance costs have been high, since many customizations need to be redone or modified after version upgrades and other changes to the ITSM tool.
- The tool as a whole becomes more error-prone, as the new/changed features that are customer-specific may add their own set of bugs.
- Many integrations (e.g. with network or application monitoring) will also need to be customized, making these more expensive.
- And frequently, we've seen that customers get stuck with a certain version level of the tool, because some customizations are not compatible with a new version.
In
this article in Network World a user gives his views on ITSM customization, and their acid test for whether to perform a specific customization is: '
Is this something that we truly need to be more effective in how we run the business?' A very good question to ask yourself, and not only related to ITSM tools.
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