Information Technology Information Library

The business world is growing increasingly flat, spreading even the smallest work forces over distance. Employees areseemingly always on the move, constantly meeting with customers or distributors and making sure the supplied chain flows unabated. Salesmen rarely come into the office anymore, instead, checking e-mails from their PDA or cell phones and only coming into the office to attend meetings or to pick up a paycheck. Even your company’s desk jockeys are getting into the action, telecommuting from home or the local coffee shop, able to access to corporate network from anywhere with an internet connection.

Perhaps your organization is set up in a campus environment, like a health care center, university, or city government, with staff spread throughout multiple buildings over several square blocks. However, your structure, your business, it is increasingly rare today for any company to house its entire work force under one roof.

Despite this shift to a distributed model, it is important that every employee has access to the business tools and information they need to do their job. This responsibility falls to the IT organization, an increasingly critical component of any company’s mission. However, managing a distributed IT infrastructure presents all sorts of complexity, consistency, compliance, and cost issues. At the same time, backing up mission - critical business data that is being created, stored, and archived across an increasingly distributed geographic area, is growing in importance as well, and is absolutely vital to the long-term health of the business and the ability to ensure compliance of industry and government regulations.

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As dispersed employees become more and more dependent on computer systems and software to do their jobs, companies find providing IT and application support for their end-users increasingly challenging. Therefore, the service desk is pivotal for any IT support operation. Service desks are where hardware and software issues are reported, as well as where resolution processes are managed. Unfortunately, most organizations lack the tools and/or skills needed to create and maintain a successful service desk.

Most outsourcing arrangements fail to achieve their objectives. Because of this, outsourcing entire IT functions has proven to be a risky proposition. A growing number of organizations seek to avoid such problems by selectively outsource specific IT functions to MSPs. Unfortunately, many of these MSPs also have problems with cost-effectively handling the volume of events produced by their client base. They lack the automated systems necessary to proactively manage their customers’ IT operations and prioritize issues.

The challenges organizations are facing concerning their service desks are not usually solved by implementing traditional NSM platforms, which generally prove to be too complex and costly. Many organizations and MSPs instead discover the advantages of a new generation of web-based, service desk automation platforms. Ideally, these platforms provide a fully integrated set of management functions that are easily utilized through the web. Intuitive user interfaces and unified functionality makes for an efficient, scalable solution that will adjust to meet an organization’s evolving needs.

For these reasons, numerous organizations and MSPs of all sizes are turning web-based automation platforms, finding in them the solution they need to meet their business objectives.

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The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a best practices framework that outlines how IT teams should operate in order to properly support their organization’s corporate objectives. According to ITIL, the service desk (also referred to as a helpdesk or call/contact center) is the centerpiece of any successful IT Service Management (ITSM) operation. In order to satisfy IT needs, service desks should provide a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for their corporate end-users and/or third-parties.

Service desks provide communication between end-users and IT teams. They respond to and report on the status of IT incidents and end-user service requests. Ideally, service desks proactively inform end-users of all service-related events, actions, and changes that may affect them.

Service desks may perform the following specific management tasks:

o Incident Management
o Availability Management
o Problem Management
o Capacity Management
o Change Management
o Financial Management
o Configuration Management
o Service Continuity Management.
o Asset Management
o Security Management
o Release Management
o Service Level Management

Few service desk teams have been able to master these responsibilities entirely due to a lack of tools or skills. Point solutions, such as Configuration Management Database (CMDB) products, exist, but there are few fully integrated, easy-to-use platforms that can handle all of the areas a service desk may be responsible for.

Failure to fulfill the above responsibilities can be damaging for broader organizations. Among the most obvious effects are:

o Slow responses to incoming calls (creates longer resolution times)
o Poor incident recording and tracking (prevents proactive analysis)
o Inadequate status reporting (leads to customer dissatisfaction)
o Ineffective problem identification, diagnosis, and resolution
o Inconsistent monitoring and escalation procedures (can potentially violate SLA)
o Failure to properly close incidents (distracts staff from real issues)
o Poor second and third line support communication and coordination

The effects listed above aggravate tension between organizations’ IT departments and their corporate end-users and executives. They can also result in customer abandonment and threaten MSPs’ corporate reputations.

Solving such problems requires the right technology and education.

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