The low hanging fruit thats just out there waiting to be picked - but will anyone change enough to benefit from it ?

How many of you are out there in IT Operations suffering the daily rigours of "business as usual" and yet suspecting that this business as usual is much less productive than it could be.

For years we have all been accepting of the fact that daily IT work involves manual tasks like looking up documentation to solve technical problems, calling help or service desks, using help systems or portals and using Google or other search engines and doing many other IT tasks that take time and cost the company you work for - loads of money.

Maybe you went a step further and used something called a knowledge management system (KM) - but somehow that didn't seem to help much - perhaps because the knowledge wasn't well maintained and kept up to date; or maybe it didn't cover all the data sources that contained the important information you were looking for; or maybe the search gave you half a million irrelevant results and not the ones you really wanted or needed?

Folks on the other side of this story have been busying themselves with "solutions" that are supposed to help with all this - a whole software industry has grown up around help and service desk solutions for trouble-ticketing; problem tracking; and many other IT Service Management (ITSM)capabilities - its even spawned a whole standard called ITIL that was invented in the UK mainly and now has version 3 out with tons of boxes that can be either filled with software products or manual procedures to deal with all aspects of IT Operations.

But have any of these ITIL or ITSM solutions really saved companies millions as they would have hoped - or have they more often than not, been the cause of "make work" and lower overall productivity in IT and even more costs added to the IT budget in terms of both people, software and maybe hardware and network too?

What we have started to find - in far-flung corners of the globe - are a small number of very innovative niche software solutions that no-one has really thought about delivering when it comes to the major ITSM vendors that service this IT Operations industry.

But strangely, when we take these products to the market, the resistance to them is very high - seemingly due to a resistance to changing the tried and tested (albeit less productive) ways that IT folks do things today.

This can only be called conservatism and we think its a very unhealthy trend in a sector that has (in past times) shown such an appetite for innovation and different ways of doing things.

Overall what we are talking about is automation and self-service - some trends that have become accepted as benefits of IT for end users since many years (either in businesses or as consumers). Even a pensioner these days is used to self-service banking online - but it seems that a modern IT developer would prefer to spend time grovelling in manuals, searching google, or calling a service desk, than helping him or her self to a solution from an automated system that could increase their personal productivity by 30% - and we wonder why this can be?

We'd be keen to hear any comments from followers of this post - do you think you have these problems cracked - do you not believe that these automation and self-help solutions would work for you or have worked for others? - or any other thoughts you might have about our ideas that such low hanging fruit exists and yet resistance to change is stopping its widespread adoption.