A Vision from Down Under
By Michael Poole
I don’t admit it to many people as it dates me (in the way carbon dates dinosaur bones), but I have been in the IT industry since before it was called IT. It was called EDP (Electronic Data Processing) before IT. Yes, the pre-historic days of punch-tape and punch-cards, real TTYs and mainframes that would heat a good sized stadium in the middle of a Russian winter.
Coding sheets, print-outs on continuous paper stacks our interface to the computer, Assembler, FORTRAN and COBOL were language options—not a wireless connected MacBook and Eclipse.
In those days, we were restricted, not just by the hardware and languages, but by the limited vision of what we were allowed to do.
Through the years, I have seen EDP evolve into IT. We’ve moved from mainframe and dumb terminals through client-server, PCs, workstations, GUI, Various flavours of windowing systems—yes there were alternatives to Microsoft once including X-windows, GEM, NeXTSTEP, OS2, networked PCs, proprietary eMail systems and now the internet and Web.
In all this time, functionality and user experience have improved; applications have become more intuitive and the web browser has become the main interface between users and applications.
At the same time, users have both become more computer literate yet simultaneously less accepting of applications and environments restricting them and delivering limited Web functionality.
Web 2.0 is here, Web 3.0 is around the corner, and users now expect that every site will be as slick, functional and active as Facebook or Twitter.
In IT, we are still happy to have a character based terminal access to some applications and clunky GUI interfaces. Why? Because we are used to them, and they still get things done.
I think that this acceptance by IT is the reason some leading ITSM vendors are able to get away with providing a bare-bones Web portals and a complex and time-consuming processes to expose IT Services to users. Anything that is not their way of doing something is discouraged. To do anything with a sophisticated, active, user-friendly Web interface requires moving away from the OOTB and developing what some vendors call “Advanced” (read: “costly, time-consuming and still restricted by our environment”) forms. What used to be “Your business your way” has now become “Your business our way.”
But users no longer accept that and, increasingly, neither do those in IT. And those in IT who don’t like that approach do like working with Kinetic Request. We at Kinetic Data still believe in “Your business your way!”
Take a close look at Kinetic Request if your business needs:
- Multiple service catalogues with individual styling, look and feel.
- To incorporate a mash-up of another site in a service item or portal.
- A unique approval process.
- To implement a service catalogue without upgrading.
- To provide unique service catalogues feeding into one ITSM system.
- To integrate with this bespoke application.
- To include multi-page request forms.
- Multiple ways to display requests based on role, location, language, division, group or user.
- To trigger tasks outside of the ITSM system without having to integrate through the ITSM system.
- To cater for non-IT functions.
- To define every request as an ITSM object—an incident, change, work-order, problem etc.
- To enable rapid change.
Kinetic Request is designed to be flexible and powerful enough to let me say, “Yes, we will do your business your way” and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
So if you want a SRM environment that you are proud of and deliver value to your users, then open a window, lean out and shout, “We need to do our business our way!”—and give us a call—we can only say, “Yes—let’s do it your way”.
Please excuse the spelling of “catalogue” in this blog—here at the top of the world, we spell like the English. 
Cassy Lueneburg