ITIL out of the box

Dear Skep,

A friend of mine works at an organisation that is migrating from one tier-1 ITIL tool vendor to another tier-1 ITIL tool vendor. They have been assured that they can adopt ITIL compliant processes out of the box using their toolset and are starting with Incident, Problem, Change, Service Catalogue, Request Fulfilment, Configuration and Service Level Management.

The vendor also sold a project manager and a technical guy for implementation.

It all seems too easy. What could possibly go wrong?

Thanks in advance.
Nervous

Dear Nervous

You should relax. Nothing can go wrong here. Look at all the things you have on your side ... um.. I mean your friend has on their side:

1. Implementing a tool is the most effective and cost-effective way to drive cultural change and improve process - it really hammers it home
2. Your new and preferred vendor is clearly confident and adept, ready to take on a comprehensive set of ITIL processes all at once. They can do this because they can knock off an ITIL process in one or two months, unlike the ITIL consultants who try to tell you cultural transformations take years
3. Software vendors are expert in ITIL. The tier-1 vendors you refer to have OGC's official certification of that on their products, as they frequently remind us
4. When you get software vendors' resources to do your project management for you, you buy the best in the industry - that's why you pay a premium.
5. Who better to understand how to implement ITIL processes than the vendor of the tool? C'mom this should be obvious. The vendor's technical staff may seem young to you, and maybe their only formal certifications are a computer science degree and a training course in their own product, but you can be sure they have done hundreds of ITIL process transformations in the same industry vertical as you using their product
6. Contracting with software vendors for delivery of an outcome is guaranteed - that's another reason why you pay more. They stand behind their products. They bring in their very best people from all over the world, especially in the pre-sales cycle, and again if the project is going badly wrong.
7. Software vendors have rich IP in ITIL processes: their material is always exciting and colourful and easy to understand
8. Software vendors demonstrate their deep understanding of cultural change through their own internal sensitive handling of human resources

Yup. When you hand your ITSM journey over to the software vendor you put yourself in safe hands.

Of course none of this applies to the tier-1 vendor that you are ...er... I mean your friend is migrating away from. Clearly the outgoing vendor had deficient non-ITIL-compliant technology and hopeless implementation skills, otherwise why would you be going from one to another? It must be their fault that you haven't already achieved ITIL nirvana.

Please be aware that The ITIL Wizard is satire. It is not meant to be taken seriously, it should not be used as advice on ITIL or anything else. He is frequently wrong (though occasionally alarmingly right).