Thinking of an overhaul of the way things work...

[timzim]

I think Tony's hit the nail on the head with his anecdote - with impending public sector cuts & BSF looming large (also having its budget strangled) we're all directly in the firing line. You & your SLT may well know vaguely what you do but the business world doesn't work like that (and they're the people being brought in to find ways to slash spending). They expect things to be quantifiable & accountable. If you were asked to give a breakdown of exactly what you did last week could you? You might rightly say "I was busy every hour of every day" (and have witnesses) but doing what? You may well be busy all the time because you're using your time inefficiently - there's no way of proving otherwise if you can't show the details. Logging your activity is a right royal PITA but if you don't do it you're not giving yourself a chance when the cuts come.

 

As far as Spiceworks goes, we use it here and, although I agree it's bloated, it works well for us. We only take urgent jobs in person (i.e. computer room down) so get all other IT requests via email which are therefore automatically entered in the log. Jobs are allocated, get prioritised properly & get done. Staff now know that if it's not urgent & it hasn't been emailed to IT Support (i.e. Spiceworks) it won't get done (well, not quite that bad but almost). Make your users do the work - you shouldn't have to do that much job logging yourself.