Post Content Copyright SunView Software
Post Content Copyright SunView Software
Just about every IT service desk has experienced at least one nightmarish incident. In most cases, these disastrous support tickets aren’t the complex problems that require creative thinking to solve – those are the tasks that challenge you in a good way. No, ITSM nightmares are those incredibly simple, repetitive and boring support tickets that, for whatever reason, end up turning into time-consuming and annoying operations.
For example, one terrible day on the service desk may involve a user who simply refuses to follow basic instructions and comes to you with something like a simple application glitch, but won’t restart his or her computer, try logging out of the app and opening it again, clear the web cache or – even worse – forgets login credentials and other key details during these processes. Having to hold a user’s hand through these types of operations becomes nightmarish, and a self-service portal can go a long way toward helping you avoid such issues.
Self-Service: Getting Disruptive Users out of the Way
A self-service portal can give you access to the tools you need to create guided checklists and processes so users can resolve basic incidents on their own. If an employee manages to forget a password, he or she can run through resetting it via the portal, not the help desk. Suddenly, a nightmarish day where an overnight outage leaves dozens of users logged out of an app that they often leave running – and have thus forgotten their password for – is no longer problematic as those individuals solve the issue on their own, letting you focus on more important tasks.
Even if all of your users don’t take advantage of self-service, you can use the technology to reduce the number of support tickets you get when simple issues come up and position your workers for optimal success.
Using Self-Service to Alleviate Frustration
Some of the most annoying issues faced by service desk employees stem from repetition, not complexity. If you have a series of processes that your support team follows to try and resolve every ticket type, you need only put those tasks in a self-service checklist and instruct users to complete them before submitting a ticket and you can reduce the monotony facing your support workers.
Sometimes the simplest incidents can turn into nightmares for your support workers. Self-service portals can enable organizations to avoid these issues and save your staff from seemingly disastrous days.
Post Content Copyright SunView Software
A good service catalog can be the lifeblood of an organization. It can gather the various apps and services users can access, create a virtual storefront where they can pick and choose what they need at any time and help IT retain control of what solutions users access while still supporting a broad move toward consumerization. IT industry advances put considerable pressure on the service catalog, and organizations that want to be able to keep up with end-user requirements need to be prepared to keep up with those demands. A few challenges that will likely dominate the service catalog landscape include:
1. The Consumerization of IT
IT consumerization is nothing new, but the trend continues to evolve and morph into a movement that is transforming IT and service desk operations. For the past few years, consumerization has been a popular discussion point, but its actual impact on businesses was isolated around the bring-your-own-device movement. Now with new trends on the horizon like the Internet of Things, IT consumerization is being kept at the forefront of the IT enterprise trends conversation.
As business users start to want consumer functionality from their IT department, support teams will need to be able to engage in customer-centric operations or risk ceding control as employees turn to widely available consumer apps and services to get the job done. This can be disastrous from a data security standpoint, but creating a service catalog to create an internal app storefront and provide users with forums and other tools to get help can give employees the freedom they want without sacrificing control.
2. Device Diversity
This ties back to the consumerization issue, but it offers enough nuances that it is worth its own point. As organizations embrace the bring-your-own-device movement and similar trends, companies need to deal with a wide range of devices and operating systems on the network. This device diversity breaks traditional models of app and service deployment. You can’t expect IT workers to get out and install software on end-user machines when people are working from multiple devices. As such, organizations increasingly need to transition their service delivery models to service-oriented architectures, something that is epitomized in the move to support cloud apps when possible.
However, if IT isn’t going to be deploying apps on user machines, it needs a way to give employees access to services, and a well-run service catalog is an ideal option.
3. License Management
Deploying a large number of apps and services on a wide range of devices leaves IT and support teams with a potentially overwhelming number of licenses to manage. Companies that fail to effectively track how many iterations of an app or service have been deployed by different users can quickly end up with a budget that gets too large to manage. What’s more, cloud sprawl can become a huge problem as business users subscribe to apps without governance from IT. Avoiding these problems are key, and the service catalog sets the boundaries that business users work within.
Cloud sprawl happens as companies give business unit managers the freedom to subscribe to apps and services to meet the needs of their subordinates. This can cause shadow IT departments to emerge as business units spend heavily on technology. Organizing apps into a service catalog that tracks licenses and other key usage metrics can help organizations avoid cloud sprawl and keep costs under control.
A service catalog is a critical element of any ITSM plan, and organizations that implement such a solution can give IT what it needs to control user access to technology while still giving employees a sense of freedom.
Post Content Copyright SunView Software
Will you soon start the process of which software or vendor to choose for your ERP, website, service desk, or other major system? If so, you may also be dreading the amount of time and energy that will be required – and the risk involved – not only for yourself, but also for your team.
Many organizations instinctively turn to the traditional RFP process for software and vendor selection. But, the RFP process has inherent shortcomings.
1. The Buyers
Buyers are often not as good as they should be at transforming their business needs and plans into crisp, clear, pertinent requirements – and segregating “needs” from “wants.”
2. The Vendors
Vendors are very good at responding to RFPs in ways that are informative, but not revealing.
3. The RFP Process
The RFP process rarely produces results that are repeatable, predictable, and generally regarded as “fair.”
What to do? It’s about Clarity and Focus
We’ve found there is a better way to approach these types of major decisions – saving everyone time and getting to key differentiators of prospective vendor software solutions based on unique requirements – through a derivative of the Kepner-Tregoe(R) Decision Analysis process, using what we refer to as our Blueprint methodology – where 1.) system requirements are described in the context of key business process flows, and 2.) there is a scenario-based approach to evaluating alternatives.
The Blueprint process includes a few assumptions:
It also utilizes a four-phase approach:
1. Clarify Purpose
2. Evaluate Alternatives
3. Assess Risks
4. Make the Decision
Of course, each phase includes Objectives, Activities, and defined Deliverables – and should include a list of stakeholders, their estimated time investment, and have those items mapped to a phased project timeline.
We provide a sample work plan for the Blueprint Scenario-Based Software Selection Process.
Competition and other business pressures on large organizations have shown that traditional management systems, quality initiatives, and incremental process improvements are no longer sufficient to improving effectiveness in most companies. Objectives of 5% to 10% improvements in all business processes each year must give way to efforts to achieve 50% or even higher improvements in the critical few key processes.
Best practices approaches to creating a new business, or business performance improvement, must encompass both how a business is viewed and structured, and/or how it can be improved. The business must be viewed not just in terms of function or division, but also in end-to-end processes across the enterprise. Achievement of a high growth business requires innovation from beginning to end by employing business process, technology and organizational resources.
Meritide integrates the principles of business process, technology and people into service delivery – and these principles are a foundation for our Blueprint methodology – and the principles for Meritide solutions.
Taking a process approach implies adopting tour client’s point of view. The processes become structured by what an organization does that is necessary to produce value for its customers.
As part of the approach we utilize the Technology Blueprint Process based on the principles of process, people, technology– to address the requirements and design of client information systems and infrastructure.
The Blueprint process has been designed to address the business and technology needs of companies while acknowledging changing business requirements and diverse technologies that must be integrated into critical business processes. The resulting Blueprint defines flexible and cost effective technology infrastructure, application, and process plans that meet the needs of the business.
Business Process Plans – for the business processes that are critical for the operation of the business and to insure that the processes keep pace with the changing needs of the company. Includes identifying high-level business requirements by business process/function and the process for prioritizing and applying technology to the business.
Application Plans – for the existing and future applications that are required to meet the needs of the business. Includes \application development and integration as well as the methods and tools to be used in the process; specific strategies for custom application development and application package purchase (make/buy).
Infrastructure Plan – for hardware platforms, operating systems, security systems, storage systems, telecommunication systems and networks required to operate the system and databases.
If you feel your organization is not getting a high enough return from its investment in (and application of) technology, a Meritide Business Systems Assessment (BSA) is a proven first step in producing clearly defined opportunities to reduce costs, increase revenue, improve capability, and mitigate risk.
Automation solutions, problem management and workflow customization tools are among the exciting, business-changing ITSM features that generate a great deal of excitement around the ITSM sector. However, these advanced technologies and services are built on a foundation of solid, effective IT service desk tools that can be invaluable for organizations with rising technology needs but limited fiscal resources. It is vital that companies don’t get so drawn into the hype cycle of sophisticated features that they neglect the core services that underpin their ITSM strategies.
Well-designed IT help desk ticketing modules build the foundation of process efficiency you need to eventually step up to more advanced ITSM modules.
These five tips will help you get your ticketing strategies up to the high standards you need to create an operational climate capable of fostering innovation:
1. Create a Clear Divide Between Service Request Types
Support tickets should be sorted and categorized before they reach the user dashboard. A support worker should be able to look at his or her ticket queue and see a list of service requests that is already prioritized and segmented based on the importance and type of task required. This provides invaluable time savings as your workers no longer need to open tickets, identify the scope of the issue, categorize it and move forward. Instead, they can move freely from one task to the next with minimal disruption.
2. Establish Escalation Workflows
Support tickets must be able to move from one level of your team to another with ease. Establishing clear work flows for ticket escalation ensures that nothing slips through the cracks between their entry to this system and being moved to the highest levels of your service desk. With each type of ticket, the support employee handling should not only know how to escalate it in terms of the process that goes into tagging it for a higher-up in the organization, but also be able to easily identify who to forward the issue to based on the type of incident.
3. Integrate Collaboration Features
A user running into a minor issue shouldn’t need to go back to the dashboard or use a separate software platform to send a message to a manager for help. Building collaboratory features into the ticketing module ensures your employees can get help when they need it, in the most convenient way possible.
4. Develop Custom Process Modules
A good service desk solution will let you create custom process modules without extensive development workloads, letting you automate repeatable components of your ticketing operations. This can drive efficiency by accelerating operations, and it also eliminates much of the tedium from the work day. You want your support team to have the time and mental energy to make intelligent decisions when it comes to handling end-user issues. Custom process modules let you create the functions necessary to get the most out of your workers and drive major operational gains.
5. Get Your Workers Involved
As a service desk leader, you have the information and expertise needed to make the right decisions as you go through these steps to upgrade your ticketing functionality. However, nobody will be closer to your current or future ticketing system than your support workers. Get them involved in the project before calling it to a close so they can provide key insight on what is working, what needs to be improved and how you can fine tune plans to make the most of the investment.
Investing in excellence in foundational areas like ticketing can help you build up to advanced ITSM features in strategic, efficient ways.
Post Content Copyright SunView Software
The scale and complexity of a CMDB, with its roots in intricate and structured IT service management ideology, has left many wondering about the usefulness of a CMDB in modern IT departments. However, ideas regarding the usefulness of a CMDB tend to be based on presuppositions that are no longer accurate about what modern CMDBs, and ITIL, can help IT teams accomplish.
The way ITIL is being utilized has shifted, with organizations increasingly looking at ITIL as a broad framework and not a step-by-step guide to managing IT services. This has led to a ground swell of innovation in how companies handle ITIL and helped businesses create a flexible, responsive operational climate. Adding a CMDB to an ITSM environment can provide critical control and transparency over the configuration, providing a result that is much more reliable and one in which your employees can do more to prevent or limit the impact of downtime.
Three ways a modern CMDB solution can help you improve reliability include:
1. Creating Transparency
A CMDB can include all of your configuration items, including employee-owned smartphones and tablets. The result is a situation in which you can not only see how any change will impact your hardware; it also shows how it will alter data pathways. For example, if you need to turn a storage machine off to perform planned maintenance, the CMDB will show you which application servers depend on data from that system, showing you if that maintenance will lead to application downtime. This transparency lets you anticipate outages and limit the impact of downtime.
This paradigm of using a CMDB to understand the implications of a planned maintenance event is just one way to control downtime. The visibility that comes from a CMDB also lets you quickly evaluate what went wrong during an emergency and get to work resolving an unplanned downtime event.
2. Improved Planning
One of the best parts of a CMDB is its ability to show how different configuration items relate to one another. This means that you can go into the database and simulate any changes you will make ahead of the action to get a clear idea of what will happen when you actually adjust your configuration. Planning for moves, additions, and changes to the IT configuration is an incredibly complex process, and these tasks can slow to a crawl as your IT leaders try to identify all of the consequences of the change. The transparency that can come from the utilization of CMDBs can come into play when you are trying to streamline operations.
Having clearer and more efficient plans around moves, adds and changes can help you avoid unintended consequences that lead to downtime, improving reliability.
3. Accelerating Responses
One of the major challenges that comes when responding to an outage is making fixes without causing additional incidents. If a server fails, you have to quickly evaluate what caused the outage, how to get a backup system running and what you need to do to return the configuration back to normal. This process can be incredibly time consuming as you work to assess complex problems and make fixes that do not create additional complications. A CMDB eases many of these issues by simplifying the process of figuring out the issues that caused downtime and identify ways to resolve the emergency situation efficiently.
CMDBs may have their basis in legacy operational models that can make them difficult to configure, but they also provide visibility and flexibility that modern businesses need to keep up with IT demands. This is particularly evident when it comes to disaster response, as CMDBs play a vital role in helping IT leaders getting systems running again.
Post Content Copyright SunView Software
IT service desk functions are being extended beyond the realm of support teams with process management functions delivered through advanced IT service desk solutions. This has the potential to be invaluable for business units facing increasingly complex operational requirements by helping to streamline and automate daily operations while becoming more dependent on technology to get the job done and maximize productivity.
3 Ways to Extend Change Management Beyond IT
1. Process Modules can Track Changes
Modern change management solutions put an emphasis on automatically documenting any changes that are completed within environment. This feature lets IT teams make changes as needed without risk by providing the ability to quickly gather logs of events and undo any changes if complications arise. This functionality doesn’t have to be limited to ITSM and can be extended to other departments of a business.
Many operational tasks within a business involve making some sort of change – altering processes, revising documents or moving data across departmental boundaries – and change management platforms can track all of these operations while allowing business units to track even the most complex operations and quickly go back and identify the cause of any problems that arise.
A perfect real world example of the benefit that a change management solution can afford a department can be found in an Accounting department. Accounting teams that take on complex audits require collaboration with other team members, and the use of a change management module would allow the accounting team to document the different functions that they complete while all actions fully, and easily, tracked for future review.
2. Extend Change Excellence Across the Business
Change is a part of numerous business transactions, whether through adjusting processes in light of new operational needs or trying to get multiple departments to collaborate on a complex project or manage devices and services that enterprise users control, the need to be able to efficiently handle changes has never been greater. Giving your users robust change management tools to track, automate, and optimize changes is a great way to maximize efficiency and minimize risk while creating substantial value potential.
3. Fuel Operational Efficiency
There are some business units that operate almost entirely around change, with Facilities based teams being a prime example. Facilities teams need to be able to manage everything from audio/video equipment to desk configurations to intelligent lighting systems and specialized HVAC equipment. All of these systems must be managed with care, requiring a careful balance of preventive maintenance, repairs, and emergency break fixes and the scheduling all of these activities can be incredibly complicated and challenging, especially as organizations invest in increasingly complex and information-driven building management technologies.
Building management technologies have evolved to include Internet of Things (IoT) devices that allow facilities teams to gather real-time data about conditions around the building or specific equipment attached to monitoring devices. This not only adds a key layer of intelligence to facility operations but also adds significant complexity to any changes that are made. The added complexity stems from both the added information that facilities teams need to process and act on as well as managing the additional equipment to gather this data. A change management platform can provide facilities teams with the process modules and automation functions they need to deal with added complexity.
Change is a reality of business, and with organizations getting more dependent on technology and work to tackle more complex process architectures, they need tools that can help them manage change. Bringing modern change management tools beyond the IT service desk has the potential to help organizations respond to shifting operational needs.
Post Content Copyright SunView Software
The rise of shadow IT presents a huge threat for IT teams, mainly because there are so many benefits to embracing shadow IT operations despite the inherent risk. When shadow IT tactics began to emerge, much of the conversation was about regaining control and coming up with a strategy to prevent logistical and security issues that came about as a result. Recently, discussions have begun to focus on the need to embrace shadow IT because of the unavoidable way it empowers business users. These divergent ideas highlight how developing robust IT service management capabilities could prove to be vital in untangling the challenges associated with shadow IT.
The Evolving Shadow IT Conversation
Shadow IT refers to the emergence of non-technical groups within a business that utilize technology assets at such quantities that they essentially form another “shadow” IT department. As business users became more comfortable using personal devices to get daily tasks done, they started looking for their own solutions outside of the guidelines of their organizations IT department. Over time, this issue escalated to the point that organizations are now dealing with a new trend; shadow IT.
A recent Forbes report emphasized the way attitudes about shadow IT vary in significant ways. The article opened with a statement that outlined how CIOs generally look at shadow IT as a menace and goes against everything that is typically associated with creating a stable and secure technology environment. Shadow IT is, essentially, a grassroots revolution ready to strike at the very heart of traditional IT practices.
Simon Mingay, vice president of research at Gartner, told Forbes that shadow IT may have already grown to such an extent that there is no point in resisting. “For most IT organizations, resistance is futile,” Mingay explained. “Better to embrace it and acknowledge that employee IT and digital skills in the increasingly digital workplace are an opportunity to innovate and create more value from IT and digital investments.” However, Forbes followed up by stating that shadow IT may actually be the best thing that has ever happened to CIOs. In many cases, the attitude is that business applications often become so old and problematic to use that employees are quietly choosing their own apps on their smartphone and letting those solutions drive efficiency.
For an alternate view, Forbes pointed to Mark Yates, senior analyst for IDC, who believes that shadow IT is creating an environment akin to the Wild West. Yates claims that the potential benefits of shadow IT are something of a mirage, with the way the movement impacts IT leading to a lack of control that doesn’t just create risk, but encourages the creation of operational silos.
With so many conflicting ideas emerging about shadow IT, technology leaders are left scrambling to figure out what will work for their business without necessarily having applicable use cases to look at that have shown success or failure over an extended period of time. However, there is another way to look at the issue – dealing with shadow IT is not an either/or decision. You don’t have to choose solely between releasing technical anarchy or embracing tight control. You can do both, and advanced ITSM solutions are emerging to make that possible.
3 ITSM Tools That can Help you Combat Shadow IT
There are many aspects of an ITSM solution that can help you manage and control your shadow IT efforts. The overarching principle here is simple – a good IT service management team can operate quickly and responsively enough to give users a consumer-like experience while maintaining the oversight needed to protect data assets and offer proper control.
Three controls that make this possible include:
1. Process Automation Tools
Many advanced ITSM modules feature process automation tools that alleviate the operational burdens facing users. A change management platform can automate change documentation, creating a built-in audit trail. With this feature in place, IT workers can make changes quickly without waiting for managerial approvals and, if something goes wrong, recall the audit trail and revert to the previous working version to avoid any significant problems. This type of process automation allows you to accelerate IT operations so users won’t be stuck with clunky apps and services due to risky or time consuming configuration changes.
Automation isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about empowering your IT workers. Process automation tools allow your IT teams to work at the pace needed to create the consumer experience needed to meet end-user demands.
2. Service Catalogs
Cloud computing has allowed IT teams to become service brokers – a role that lets them identify cloud apps and services that offer a combination of quality and stability that users need. Shadow IT ends up rising when the corporate IT department isn’t offering users the options they need. Creating a robust service catalog gives users options. If they don’t like how one app workers, they can unsubscribe and choose another. Shadow IT becomes less of a problem when users turn to IT-sanctioned services when looking for new solutions.
3. Self-Service Portals
Giving users freedom to “shop” for apps that are available from the IT department will have a limited impact unless users are free to access a new solution immediately. If they have to wait for IT to deploy new app instances, they may go elsewhere. If self-service functionality is built into the service catalog, they’ll have the new solution available with the click of the mouse. Similarly, users can solve their own tech problems and stay up-to-date on important policies and procedures.
Finding The Right Balance With Shadow IT
You can embrace the principles that make shadow IT advantageous for businesses without exposing yourself to risk. Advanced ITSM tools let you create the open, flexible and fast operational environment that shadow IT generates while still maintaining the control technology leaders need.
Post Content Copyright SunView Software