Before You Attend Tool Day: The Nine Questions to Ask First
Each year, ITIL Tool Day gathers the professionals in our field who face a decision that most of us will only encounter a handful of times in our careers: selecting the platform that will handle service management for the next five-plus years. The event offers comparison charts, demo requests, and truly useful capabilities, such as automation, AI-enabled triage, and self-service options that customers may actually want to use.
Before you attend, I recommend allocating twenty minutes to something less exciting: your own foundational elements.
I repeatedly observe this pattern across organizations of varying sizes and maturity levels. A tool decision is taken with careful consideration, with stakeholders consulted, requirements documented, and vendors properly shortlisted. The platform is then launched. Within two quarters, someone asks why the tool, meant to fix inconsistency, has instead accelerated things. Three teams interpret "resolved" in different ways. No one can confidently answer "who owns this service?" The categorization scheme mirrors how procurement understood the problem eighteen months ago, rather than how the support desk currently prioritizes work.
The tool did not fail. It operated as configured, automating existing processes, even the unclear parts.
Here are nine items to verify before you shortlist any tool.
After years of ITSM work, I have identified nine foundational elements that remain consistently important, no matter the platform. Before beginning a tool discussion, or sitting through another vendor's roadmap presentation, honestly evaluate your organization against each of these:
- Process clarity - Would five different people describe your incident process in the same way and sequence?
- Service ownership - Can anyone answer "who owns this service?" without consulting an organizational chart?
- Roles & responsibilities - Is the RACI for your busiest handoff documented, or does it depend on the knowledge of three individuals?
- Support models - Are your tier‐escalation criteria clearly defined, or does Tier 1 escalate everything (or nothing)?
- Knowledge - Is there a single, trusted source of truth, or does the correct answer reside with a specific individual?
- Categorisation - Does your taxonomy align with how your support teams actually prioritize issues, or does half of everything fall into "Other"?
- Governance - Who can approve an exception, and is that decision recorded?
- Reporting - Do your dashboards inform decisions, or merely populate a monthly presentation?
- Customer experience - Can customers track progress without needing to contact anyone for an update?
Answering these questions does not require a platform. It requires workshops with the appropriate people, conversations that tool evaluations often skip in favor of comparing feature lists.
Why this matters more at Tool Day than anywhere else
Vendors will understandably demonstrate what their platform does well. They cannot show you how your organization's existing ambiguity will behave when automated. A workflow engine does not resolve disagreement about ownership; it simply executes the interpretation built into the configuration, at scale, and immediately.
The reality is that strong foundations enable almost any reasonable tool to work well, while weak foundations cause almost any tool to disappoint-including the one you are about to be sold.
Therefore, my suggestion for Tool Day 2026 is this: bring your requirements document. Also bring honest answers to those nine questions. If gaps exist, that is not a reason to delay the tool discussion; it is a parallel effort, and often a faster one than expected. Focused workshops can address most of these issues in weeks, not months. This approach will produce a platform that automates clarity, rather than automating the existing problems.
Technology should accelerate good service management. It can only do so once "good" has been defined.
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