This guide describes our out-of-the-box Pink Elephant certified ITIL system.

The ITIL system provides all the functionality to manage a complex IT organization, including Service Request Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Configuration Management, Project Management, Contract Management, and more. Our goal has been to provide ready-to-go, out-of-the-box ITIL-compliant structures and process flows for managing IT services, while enabling complete extensibility to meet the needs of any particular organization.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices intended to improve IT service while reducing failures and costs. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on ITIL. The actual implementation of any ITIL process is open to a wide range of interpretations. While the basic structure of Service, Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management is likely to be part of any ITIL implementation, the services that fall under each category, the relationship of the Service Catalog to these various processes, the ways requests are structured and managed and many other details will vary widely based on the needs and preferences of a particular organization, as well as the functionality of the particular software program used to implement ITIL.

Companies may implement ITIL along a spectrum moving from simple to complex – from a fairly streamlined, direct approach, to a more controlled approach, with more process steps and approvals required for relatively simple tasks. Based on our years of experience implementing IT service solutions that people actually use, we recommend starting from the simplest approach first, and adding some of the additional features once you are seeing the benefits. For instance, the standard progression for incidents in ITIL moves from one or more incidents to the creation of a problem record in which root cause analysis is done, which may then result in a change request. However, we have designed the system so that if a person has a problem with a printer, it does not necessarily require the creation of an incident, a problem, and a change request, just to get a new ink cartridge installed. However, if you want to follow this more extended process, we have made it as easy as possible – from any record a button can be clicked to create the related records and map field values from the current record. There are no duplicate text entries when creating problems, change requests and incidents.

Since there are so many different ways of implementing ITIL, this documentation provides a detailed guide to how it has been implemented in the out-of-the-box Agiloft ITIL KB. We have pre-built the complex relationships and functions that many companies may want, while attempting to avoid too much complexity for those who prefer a less bulky and more efficient implementation. This is a rather difficult balancing act, and while we have done our best to get it right for the largest number of customers, the real power of the system is in how easy it is to change it to adapt to your company's specific preferences and needs.

We will offer some guidance throughout this document to where to go to make changes to the critical relationships and behavior to suit your needs.

Who Should Read This? 

This guide is primarily intended to be used by admin users or system designers who need structural information about the ITIL KB in order to customize it.