Whenever you're planning to implement an ITIL Process for the first time, or your are progressing against your Service Improvement Plan, it's important to be able to understand -in depth - the true picture about the 'today' position.
For example, planning to Implement Problem Management will commence with a situation assessment of the current organization, asking questions such as:-
- How are Problems accepted, processed and eliminated today?
- Who is responsible for this?
- How much time (and cost) is this consuming?
- What activities and tasks take place to make this a reality?
- How effective is the current function in achieving their defined goals?
- What measurements are collected and how are these presented?
- Who reads the results and what decisions are taken?
- What 'gaps', challenges and obsatacles exist?
- What data and information is readily available to understand the today position?
Answering these questions (and others!) will assist in determining a crystal clear picture of the today position.
When we get down to the detail - we all need tools.
Not always from the big Vendors, not always integrated toolsets. What I mean here is 'tools' and techniques to help us understand what's going on today and what solid foundation should we lay down to help us efficiently and effectively manage the future.
Yesterday I came accross (by accident) this old link to a tools page - that contains a brief description of over 350 such tools. Some are ancient and offer little value when considering ITIL. Others are perfectly relevant to today's world. Admitedly, there's some I've never heard of! But I've promised myself to have a fish around and learn some more.
The original page seems to be accredited to Bart-Jan Hommes who looks like he was doing some important research at the Deft University of Technology a few years back.
Why not grab a Latte and dive in for 5 minutes and see if there's anything there that will assist you? You can access the main index here.
If you know of any other valuable sites that contains useful tools - please leave a comment and let our other readers know. Many Thanks!

Chris,
Some of my readers have expressed an interest in you writing a post for the IT Service Blog on how you use easyCMDB in reality.
Can you please email me to discuss.
Many thanks,
Robin.
Posted by: Robin Yearsley | March 25, 2006 at 05:32 PM
Hi,
I'd like to advise your site of our great product for supporting ITIL implementation.
Details at: www.easycmdb.com
Posted by: Chris Walker | March 25, 2006 at 09:27 AM