The Beetil Blog
Blog » Usability versus Compliance
Creating Beetil has been an interesting and fun challenge, especially from a usability point of view. Beetil is based on the internationally recognised ITIL service management framework – a framework that at its heart is great common sense that’s good for your business. Once you start using this framework you’ll wonder how you ever got on without it. The problem is in the starting. ITIL can seem to be a daunting beast and more than a few people have been put off by it’s apparent complexity.
We don’t think it needs to be this way – hence Beetil! Our aim with Beetil is to get ordinary people to share the ITIL love.
So, when it came to designing this application we’ve made a few conscious decisions to put a bit of friendliness above following the rules to the very letter. For example we’re calling an ‘RFC’ (Request for Change) just a plain old ‘Change’. No special terminology to learn or remember, and no confusion as to why an approved change or even a fully implemented change is still called a ‘Request for Change’. While those who are familiar with ITIL might not have a problem with this terminology, we thought ‘hey, why not just call them what they really are so that people who are new to this concept can look at it, understand it straightaway and see the common sense’. We’re still following the spirit of ITIL and don’t believe we’ve lost anything in translation. You may agree or you may not, and we’re open to your thoughts and ideas.
Another and more contentious decision was to combine the ‘Reason’ and ‘Justification’ fields for proposed changes to a service. I personally feel it’s a fantastic exercise to force people to explain why they think a change to a service needs to happen. It really does sort out the chaff from the wheat. The more people who take it upon themselves to do this the merrier, and this is why we’ve made it easier for you by giving you just one field to fill in as opposed to two. We appreciate the subtle difference between ‘Reason’ and ‘Justification’ – we just feel that your average busy and sceptical IT professional might not have the time, nor inclination, to ponder on this subtlety and is more likely to embrace this exercise if we make it as painless as possible. Nothing is stopping you from entering in two distinct entries here – you can get as involved (or not) as your business requires. Now we know this is not for everyone, but our aim here is to get people learning, using and embracing ITIL, not ticking the boxes for compliancy certificates.
We’ll be constantly reviewing and weighing up the pros and cons of these decisions and are open to your feedback.
Tags: comformity, compliance, itil, terminology
February 5th, 2009
Not usability AND Compliance?
You should post up some screenshots of beetil into your posts, so people can see how awesome it is and how hard we worked to make it go. ;D