Web based versus Web enabled ITIL Service Management

After attending the recent Service Desk and Support show in London we were surprised by the number of vendors focusing on their web portals. In previous years, this was always an after thought, and indeed it still is, but now with additional marketing. It is great to see renewed focus on this area, something which LiveTime has been pushing since 2002, however it is important to understand the difference between the hype and reality.

Virtually all solutions are actually web enabled, not web based. This is a term that has been invented specifically to mask the fact that the solution is still client server based, but has some web functionality. This usually means that the solution has a customer web interface. Some go further, and allow incident review for technicians, but little beyond that. If you actually start asking the vendor how you manage the application through the web interface they will quickly redirect you to the full client.

Open Standards and Plugins are mutually exclusive

Additionally, and perhaps more disturbing, is that when vendors show off these customer portals, they only work on 1 or 2 browsers. Since many of these solutions are based on the Windows platform, most only focus on support for Internet Explorer and sometimes Firefox, but with reduced functionality. Many also push so many plugins and ActiveX controls through your browser, you are no better off than using a full client in the first place. 

In fact, one of the major vendors even claimed to be completely web based, even though all they were doing was using the web browser as a mechanism to deliver the thick client to the desktop. Unless it is HTML, it is not web based.

While it is great to see renewed focus on the web, it is important to understand that these solutions can never work as end to end SaaS solutions like a true web based system can. If you can only provide customer support for users with a certain browser or version number, then how effective can your customer service solution really be.