h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you've worked in IT over the last decade or so, you may have become aware of a set of best practices known as the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL (you can pronounce it as either 'eye-till' or 'ittle' according to your taste - I prefer the former).

Essentially, it's a set of five large and exceedingly boring books, which recommend how you go about commissioning, designing, coding, testing and supporting IT systems. It doesn't tell you which tools or technologies you should use; it just gives you guidelines that you can follow to organise your IT department and outlines the processes that people need to follow to get everything done.

It was originally designed for use by the UK Civil Service, but it's now become a worldwide standard, used in commercial and public sector organisations alike.

People go on ITIL training courses to learn all about it. I've done them all over the years, and have a piece of paper which proclaims me to be an 'expert'. It's not unlike the diploma that the Wizard of Oz awarded to the Scarecrow. I also have a little diamond-shaped pin badge in a dull purple colour which I can, if I wish, wear on my business suit to tell people I know my ITIL. Amazingly, I've actually seen people who do this.

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Often, the first thing that people learn about ITIL is the terminology. If nothing else, it's ensured that us IT crowd can communicate using the same language. There's a long glossary at the end of each of the books which defines all the terms and acronyms that they need to know.

Perhaps the first thing they will learn is the difference between an incident and a problem…

When your computer goes wrong and you ring the help desk, you might call it any of a number of things (most of which are unrepeatable). You might say you are having an issue, or an event, or a problem. ITIL tells you that these words are wrong. What you are actually reporting is an 'incident'. Indeed, in 1970, Apollo 13 pilot Jack Swigert should have contacted Mission Control by saying "Houston, we've had an incident". I guess we can forgive him his ITIL faux pas in the circumstances.

In fact, it doesn't matter whether the fault lies in your computer hardware, or in the software running on it, or in the network, even in the power supply. ITIL says that if you could do something before and you can't do it now, then that's an 'incident'. You may have noticed that we no longer have traffic accidents or house fires - the emergency services now call them all incidents.

The primary purpose of IT support is to get you working again as quickly as possible. The help desk may ask you to check your settings, or to reboot the system, or they may have to get engineers to fix something that's gone wrong somewhere down the line. They might also ask you work around the fault (maybe you could use a spreadsheet to do a job rather than the software app that's broken). The point is: when you can get working again, it's no longer an incident. They can close the ticket they opened for you.

So, we can't call a computer fault a 'problem' in that sense. But the term does exist. In a later journal I'll write a bit more about problems.