Entomological Service Management

(Entomology is the study of insects – ed)

I met up with the team behind Beetil the other day (disclosure – I had an orange juice, they paid). Beetil titles itself “the world’s most user friendly IT service management solution” – so what does that mean?

While currently in beta, Beetil already covers the spectrum of functions service management requires – from incident logging to change and release management – and it’s all based on ITIL best practices which is industry code for saying it meets the independent best practice guidelines for managing  IT service events.

Now I have to say I’m not a veteran of service management so my review is less of a comparative analysis between different offerings and more a layman’s impression on the Beetil look and feel. While I have little experience with ITIL, my brief foray into the product did show a high level of traceability and linking. It seems every action within Beetil is traceable and there is lots of opportunity to create linkages and reuse information between different functional areas (problems, incidents, changes). See screenshots below (from the Beetil demo account)

Issues can be assigned a priority and this feeds through to give a time/importance measure so operatives can determine their own work plan.

Interestingly enough, co-founder of Beetil, Dan Lee, told me that, while Beetil is primarily aimed at IT companies wanting to manage their services better, it can easily applied to other industries that need to manage their services better too. And that they have a couple of companies that use Beetil for non-IT related activities – below is a screen shot of a non-IT related use;

I’m no expert but I liked what I saw from Beetil – they’re out of beta in a week or so and pricing will be set at USD25 per user per month, volume discounts are also available.