My two cents on this magic word - Process

Process is really a magic word top management really like to use, especially top management in IT.

Now, every BIG companies are trying to get themselves into the ITIL certification to prove that their IT organization are MATURE.

That said, our IT organization become some really managed operation instead of the playground of technies young guy with the screw drivers on his hands

The concept sounds very great and now we have incident management process to handle incidents, problem management to make sure repeated incidents were investigated properly and find out the root cause. All changes are properly managed by change management board so that changes will not impact the business. Also, we have SLA management, Business continuity management, capacity management,...etc.

We all these processes, we are more "professional" and everyone are "happy"!!!

Now, when we are working with our users who we don't like or we don't know, we will tell them the following...

"Please follow our incident management process to log a call to our India helpdesk and you will get a ticket number. The ticket will then assign to our local engineering team and they will dispatch an engineer to fix your incident."

Sounds professional and fully compliance with our process!!

P.S. Guess what is the "incident" in the above case? Our troublesome secretary wants to ask me to install her favourite screensavers again.....:)