SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show: Meet the big names
With SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show conference programme going live, you can now start to plan your visit. Over the 11-12 May 2022, explore the variety of sessions being held at the three seminar theatres covering everything from ITIL to CMDBs, with sessions from big names in the industry.
As we start recovering from the pandemic, remote working is of course on everyone’s agenda. Jump Cloud a comprehensive and flexible cloud directory platform, will be hosting a session called: Remote work, everywhere, all the time - How has the pandemic affected the service and support function? The panel will explore the issues that organisations are facing around their support and service capabilities and how teams have coped as remote work went from stop-gap, to reliable option, to business as usual.
This year’s line-up also features Marval Software who’re running a session on the future of AI and Machine Learning in Service Management. It’s hard to avoid the constant developments in AI technology and how the use of AI, Machine Learning and automation has become a necessity instead of a luxury.
If you’re keen to get into the intricacies of enterprise service management, Hornbill are hosting a Q&A session called Meet The Innovators. Three award-winning IT leaders in the market, whose service impact has changed their organisation’s DNA will share the wrong turns and challenges they’ve encountered, alongside the solutions and tactics that allowed them to reshape the service experience across FTSE 250, Government and Blue Light organisations.
Hear from expert speakers at the only FREE ITSM education programme in Europe. View the full conference programme here.
SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show releases conference programme featuring over 35 sessions
You can now explore what’s on at SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show over the 11-12 May 2022. Three seminar theatres will be covering everything from ITIL to CMDBs, with sessions from big names in the industry including Marval Software, Hornbill and Ivanti.
One of this year’s recurring themes is Experience Management. Post pandemic both Customer and Employee Experience Management are more important than ever to ensure the best service delivery. There’ll be tips on how to get started, plus using it to continually improve service. For those looking to the future you’ll also find sessions on AI, automation and Machine Learning – best practice, real-life case studies and how they can be utilised on any size service desk.
Gain insights from thought-leaders and business experts all in one place, including Kelverion who will be discussing the results of a recent survey they conducted to identify respondents plans for automation and to gauge the reality of the hype generated by market analysts in ‘The Reality of Service Management Automation’. Ivanti will be delving in to ‘Designing a Great Self Service’ with a look at a typical user interaction with several popular sites to see what tips and tricks can be ‘borrowed.’ Moonshot Consultancy will be holding a session called ‘No More Heroes: Transforming Incident Management’, which will outline how you can significantly reduce your average recovery time to recover in record time, reducing variability and enabling a continuous improvement model.
SITS 2022 is looking forward to bringing people together again with some great education sessions on people, process, technology and business. You can view the full conference programme here.
SITS Speaker Q&A: Kelvin Tegelaar, Partner at NinjaOne
Kelvin Tegelaar is not only a prolific blogger, PowerShell expert, and Microsoft MVP, but he is also CTO at Lime Networks, partner of NinjaOne, a managed services provider based in Rotterdam, and the creator of the popular blog CyberDrain. Get to know Kelvin with these 4 quick fire questions before catching him at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show on the 11-12 May 2022 at ExCeL London.
1. What tips would you give Service Desk & IT Support Professionals looking to drive their IT services forward?
First, teach yourself how to implement automation in ways that go beyond just using tools such as PowerShell so that IT teams can best support the business. Business is no longer a separated entity from IT but part of a cohesive whole. Additionally, being good at technology is not the only thing you need as an IT professional. One of the best things you can focus on these days is finding balance between your technical chops and ‘soft-skills’
2. How did you get into the IT profession (or IT support)?
I’ve always had an interest in technology and watching it become the fastest growing market in the world only made it more attractive for me. The challenge and constant puzzle solving are two things about IT that has always appealed to me.
3. What are you most looking forward to at SITS 2022?
Meeting my peers and helping them get to a higher level. I also love learning about experiences from other IT-engineers and professionals as there are often large differences between markets and geographies.
4. In your opinion, what are the most innovative technology products on the market right now?
I believe all public clouds are currently accelerating innovation in our market. Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud are making computing power available for everyone. It’s a lot simpler and faster to quickly develop an application, even if you’ve never touched a programming tool. Low code and zero code solutions are affecting business worldwide and as IT engineers we all have to make sure that even those applications get the attention they deserve.
Kelvin Tegelaar’ session on ‘How to stop getting automation wrong' will take place in Theatre 3 on 11 May at 15.00.
For more information and to register for a free visitor pass, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com
How Well Are You Enabling Your Organization’s Remote Workers?
You don’t need me to tell you that the global pandemic changed how organizations work, impacting corporate IT service delivery and support capabilities. But much of what was deployed in the first half of 2020 to aid homeworking employees was a rapidly applied “band-aid” that ensured business continuity. Now, with some employees back in the office, some working remotely, and some in a hybrid of the two, there’s a need to ensure that the IT service delivery and support capabilities employed are fit-for-purpose in enabling end-users to work wherever they might be.
If your IT organization has adopted ITIL, consider this as continual improvement. If not, then it’s simply improvement. But in both instances, it’s ensuring that your IT organization delivers the services and IT support capabilities that your business needs.
What do your remote workers need?
In 2020, I think we all knew what the employees who found themselves forced into homeworking needed. In IT, we probably knew better what they needed than the employees did themselves. But now, two years later, it’s likely no longer the case, especially with hybrid working, also known as working-from-anywhere (WFA), now the dominant way of working for half of organizations according to recent ManageEngine survey data.
So how well do you understand the needs of your remote working end-users – both homeworkers and those WFA? How do your IT organization’s services enable them to do the work they need to do productively? Plus, when that technology isn’t working as it should, how easy is it to access the support they need?
Like most IT organizations, the traditional IT metrics you employ are unlikely to provide this insight. First, these metrics likely focus on operational performance, i.e. what IT does rather than what it achieves. Second, current reporting capabilities might not be differentiating between office-based and remote workers. It’s probably just a pan-organization view of IT’s performance that doesn’t appreciate that remote workers have different needs and expectations to their office-based counterparts.
Importantly, the current IT service delivery and support capabilities might adversely impact remote workers, particularly their productivity. This issue is a significant opportunity for experience data to help.
Looking at the quality of remote worker enablement using experience data
In addition to the individual and benchmark end-user experience data we’ve collected and collated for customers for over half a decade, we also introduced insight into remote-worker experiences at the outset of the pandemic. This new dataset enabled IT organizations to understand where the IT status quo, and any changes they were making, was helping or hindering end-users.
This service has continued based on the additional value delivered to our customers. The latest aggregated data for the last six months provides essential insights into remote-worker enablement – from their issues to how well improvements are working.
The level of remote-worker-enablement success as we entered 2022
The remote-working headline from the latest Global IT Experience Benchmark Report is that organizations continue to get better at supporting employees in remote work. Employee happiness with remote work increased from 57 to 69 over the past year (as shown below).
It’s excellent news, but please note that this isn’t for an average organization. It’s for an average customer organization that has been, by being a customer, focused on improving the end-user experience and reducing lost productivity.
Importantly, though, it should make you question whether your IT organization is doing enough for remote employees, especially if it can’t see and understand how this now-large group of employees is being helped or hindered by IT.
But knowing how IT is impacting remote employees is not enough
As the saying goes, “the devil is in the detail.” Or, as we call them, the factors that influence end-user experiences – the good, the bad, and the neutral.
Interestingly, our H2/2021 data shows that end-users made more evenly distributed selections between the remote-work feedback factor options than they did for the experience with ticket-based IT. In other words, there are no specific factors that stand out as dominant influencers of end-user happiness or unhappiness with remote work.
This insight, in itself, is important because it means that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that IT organizations can take to optimize remote work. Perhaps even without collecting experience data themselves. Instead, the only way an IT organization can understand what matters most to its remote workers is to gather experience data internally.
The following three charts show this relatively even distribution of remote work happiness factors.
Importantly, though, your organization’s own feedback data will start to highlight what’s working and what’s not. Plus, and this is critical, it will provide insight into what matters most such that (continual) improvement initiatives can be focused on the right things, i.e. what matters most to remote workers.
If you want to find out more about how to enable your organization’s remote workers better, and to be one of the first to see the complete set of data points and insights from the H2 2021 Global IT Experience Benchmark Report, then please register to our webinar on Thursday 24th February (or watch later, on demand).
Sami Kallio is the CEO and co-founder of HappySignals. Before starting HappySignals, he worked as the CEO of Palmu.exe, a service design company. Before that, he was responsible for the service design unit at Tieto Corporation. He believes happiness and productivity are the keys to transforming business IT culture for the better.
A Guide to Data Integration for Service Management
Data integration for service management helps unsilo enterprise and customer data, granting service management professionals a comprehensive view of the right information.
Service-management requires consistent and accurate data. But this consistency is difficult to achieve when disparate tools lead to information silos – and the implications are huge.
Not having the right data available, among the right people, at the right time can undermine the integrity of an organizations data-driven decisions.
Gartner estimates that 97% of business decisions are based on data of unacceptable quality. Further reports indicate flawed data costs companies an astounding 20% of their revenue.
Two leading drivers of poor data quality are unintegrated shadow IT and siloed applications.
A Symantec study showed that 1,516 cloud apps are in use by the average enterprise, but CIOs believe that only 30-40 cloud apps are in use by their enterprise. This means many unused apps could be generating useful data that is disconnected from the enterprise.
Forbes Insights found that only 34% of executives have achieved a single view of the customer with aggregated customer data. In addition, 52% of executives say that their siloed apps impede a single view of the customer.
The lack of a holistic view of enterprise and customer data can severely impact an organization’s service management strategies and processes.
The solution? Data integration.
What Is Data Integration?
Data integration means getting the right data from there to here—so that the data can ultimately be used to offer better service and inform business decisions.
Through better data integration, organizations can enable mass data synchronization between a service-management application (like ServiceNow, Jira or Salesforce) and other endpoints—either in batch updates, or dynamically in real-time.
Such interconnectivity between business applications is fundamental to automating business (and IT) processes. Often those applications will need data to be transformed to a different format as it moves between them, and sometimes the applications are different versions or instances of the same tool—but whatever the case, you need to be able to get all the right data to the right place at the right time.
Why Do Data Integration?
Data integration is all about moving data from one place to another. This often involves large quantities of data, and the integrations are typically one-way.
Data integration is necessary for a variety of purposes, including the following:
- Developing and testing with real data
- Promoting and sharing foundation data
- Populating a CMDB from external sources
- Syncing data for reporting
- Copying to a big-data framework
- Upgrading a tool or migrating to a new tool
Data integration exists because perfectly aligned data doesn’t. If you’re trying to get data from there to here, it’s because whatever data you have with you now is insufficient.
The Right Data Integration Solution for Service Management
There are a number of different data integration solutions for Service Management use cases.
The “Do it Yourself” (DIY Data Integration) approach is often assumed to be a cost-effective solution.
At scale, the best data integration model is an integration as a service via message bus native application.
However, for large organizations in particular, the reality does not typically meet this expectation, as DIY data integrations come with hidden costs.
Creating and maintaining custom integrations at scale is often inefficient and expensive.
As data volumes grow, custom integrations can severely impact ServiceNow performance, slowing organizations instances down.
Further, custom integrations consume development resources that could otherwise focus on value adding tasks.
This makes the DIY approach only really viable for smaller, low volume “one-off” integrations.
At scale, the best data integration model is an integration as a service via message bus native application.
Whether transferring data to run reports, to keep another IT Service Management (ITSM) tool in sync, or to fulfill other needs, modern organizations face the challenge of integrating data without creating significant performance impacts on the production instance of their ITSM tool.
The rest of the organization cannot simply stop what they are doing so that IT can run reports.
With the right integration solution in place, a service provider can create reports or perform other data replications for customers without performance impacts to their ITSM instances.
That kind of integration solution dynamically detects changes in data. Rather than relying on a batch poll, it pushes only the data that has changed, enabling the best possible throughput and flexibility with the least impact to the publishing application.
Native applications in particular provide a number of benefits.
Without a native application, organizations must undertake manual data entry data and query data across multiple, disparate systems.
Even many custom integrations require more labor than necessary, often requiring ongoing developer maintenance for a solution that is supposed to be “automated”.
With an application native to the ITSM solution, combined with a common data model, integrations are simple. Organizations can avoid hours of manual data entry, custom development, and maintenance labor.
Interested in a native integration as a service solution? Speak to Perspectium.
Perspectium recently announced the Iodine update.
The Perspectium Iodine release introduces many improvements based on user feedback, including powerful data storage options, productivity and data analysis tools and flexible backup and restore for ServiceNow.
See the webinar recording where we examine the new release’s functionality and dive into more features and details.
Registration is open for the long-awaited SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show
SITS – The Service Desk & IT Support Show has announced that they will be returning to ExCeL London, after three long years. Over the 11-12 May 2022, Europe’s leading event for IT Service Management (ITSM) and Support, will host over 60 IT suppliers as they give demonstrations of their newest tools and catch up with clients old and new.
Meet the teams from big brands including BMC and IFS assyst who’ll be exhibiting with newer companies, as they share their latest updates and innovations.
As well as networking with exhibitors, there will be two days’ worth of educational conferences to explore. Three seminar theatres will also hold over 35 free educational sessions and a Keynote theatre with ten presentations, as well as multiple Breakfast Briefings and Hot Topic workshops to choose from.
After having to postpone the 2019 show, the industry is raring to get back together after a tough couple of years. Event Organisers, Diversified Communications UK, predict this show to be the biggest yet as people are more excited than ever to meet face-to-face. ITSM vendors and cutting-edge start-ups have been preparing plenty of new innovations and research into the latest tools and trends to share with the ITSM community.
Apply for your free ticket here.
How can today’s IT leaders achieve the balance between agility and control?
The IT department of a typical organisation has never been more in the spotlight. All business processes rely upon IT to function, and all customer facing transactions are performed with some form of IT system, be it a web page, a mobile device or an application running on a server.
Business demand is changing more rapidly than ever before. Business projects are initiated with diminishing lead times causing pressure upon IT to react and stand-up project teams to support the change. In some cases, IT finds itself playing catch-up to business projects or being circumvented altogether, as the business can procure cloud services or applications easier than ever before. And these services work. And they’re cheaper. So, IT leaders are asked, “Why do we need an IT department?!”
And once delivered into production, IT is asked to support a system that it may have had limited involvement in designing, implementing or testing.
Against this somewhat frightening scenario, technology leaders must develop robust methods for achieving four things.
- Firstly, engaging with the business to understand what their strategic and tactical plans are, as well as connecting with the decision makers who sanction projects on a whim.
- Secondly, developing robust processes for capturing strategic and tactical demand, and reacting to the unexpected left field demands, by adapting to the rate of business change.
- Thirdly, the ability to design and transition these services into a reliable live environment.
- Finally, maintaining these services in a highly reliable state, despite the high rate of change expected by the business. One CIO we work with calls it, “move fast and don’t break anything”!
Capturing the dynamic business demand is vital. Once captured, service design and transition approaches must be flexible enough to understand the business requirements in sufficient detail, and apply an appropriate level of control and rigour, whilst not constraining the business in its desire to move quickly. A delicate balancing act of agility and control.
Once in production, IT must be able to do the basics well in terms of logging incidents and requests from end-users, making it simple and efficient for them to engage with IT. Failure to do this will only exacerbate the tendency to bypass IT altogether.
Finally, IT must be able to absorb incremental and operational change, to “keep the lights on”. This involves robust approaches to the assessment and authorisation of change, which once again, strike the right balance between agility and control. IT should have the ability to assure its own operational change, and that initiated by the business, to preserve the reliability and performance of the IT systems, and subsequently the integrity of the business processes described at the beginning.
In today’s highly complex technology teams, it is critical that IT processes are able to consistently deliver the expected outcomes. In a practical sense, this includes reducing unplanned downtime, recovering from major incidents quickly and supporting the business in their growth plans through robust demand management and performance monitoring.
Syniad IT are specialists in the design and optimisation of IT operating models, that deal with this full end-to-end lifecycle of an IT service. We develop robust processes, select underpinning tooling and design governance, performance and reporting models.
Our work typically begins with a baseline assessment, to better understand the challenges and the issues being experienced. Every organisation is different after all. We make no assumptions and enter into each engagement with an open mind. As an output of this assessment phase, we develop an improvement roadmap, working alongside our client’s own team to develop and implement solutions.
We pride ourselves on our ability to execute on our plans. We bring about rapid and sustainable change to IT ways of working, helping organisations meet the demands being placed upon them by the business for highly reliable IT services.
We are specialists in IT Operating Models, IT Service Management (ITSM) and Service Integration & Management (SIAM). We also help organisations maximise their investment in their IT tooling, particularly ITSM tools, such as ServiceNow.
If the issues and challenges described here resonate with you, please Contact us here at Syniad IT to discuss further.
To find out how we help organisations like yours design and build highly effective operating models, read our ultimate guide to Design + Build.
5 Main Reasons To Implement Digital Workflows
Innovating processes and automating workflows leads to an improved business process management, with significant advantages in terms of quality and savings.
Why adopting a central workflow management tool is convenient?
From IT Management to Human Resources, from Customer Care to Administration, many departments can take advantage from the adoption of a no code - low code solution for the automation of their processes.
Discover the 5 main benefits of digital workflows below.
- Simplified Internal Processes
The adoption of a workflow tool is useful to simplify daily task management of various departments.
To give an example, corporate Change processes can be managed with flows: not only activities to be done are automatically assigned to the correct staff member, but also deadlines and reminders are automated. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined as well as each one’s tasks and the information they have access to.
This allows for processes to be transparent and it simplifies internal flow management, in particular when adopted by medium-to-large-sized companies.
- Increased Productivity
By adopting a digital workflow solution, it is possible to standardize processes.
This increases productivity and allows for a decrease of costs and time. Automating repetitive tasks, reducing many manual steps and eliminating redundant activities, brings much more than just the optimization of resources. Problems and downtimes are identified and registered more quickly.
Such greater efficiency also translates into an improved task management and better interpersonal relationships.
- Reduced Errors
Having a global, clear and defined vision of company processes allows to reduce errors, avoid delays and reach goals earlier. In fact, not only goals and tasks appear more defined and measurable but also data are imported and elaborated automatically; manual typing is drastically reduced and all information needed are in a single tool.
Moreover, thanks to the integration with other systems, the possibility of making manual errors and having to lose time in further reworking is reduced to a minimum.
- Real-Time Data Tracking
Multiple applications are required daily to run business activities. Information need to be exchanged among different systems, however, not all instruments can collect, track and share data in real time.
With a workflow management tool, it is possible to quickly import and monitor data from different applications, such as CRM, ERP, email accounts and IoT, and integrate them making data available to the correct company resources.
The constant tracking of all information allows to analyze performance with extreme precision, thus promptly identify inefficiencies and possible areas of improvement.
- Improved Quality of Work
What is another natural consequence of adopting digital workflows within a company? Happier employees and more satisfied customers.
Needless to say, a tool that automates activities and speeds up workflows allows for greater transparency and simplicity in the management of processes. The intelligent distribution of tasks, as well as the clear assignment of roles within a given project, eliminate misunderstandings and encourage collaboration.
In addition, entrusting a series of operations, controls and alerts to a specific tool allows employees to concentrate better on what is actually their job, reaching goals faster with less stress and dissatisfaction.
Can a flow management tool really impact positively the entire company?
It is clear how the advantages to use a workflow solution to automate flows are truly remarkable not only for large-sized companies.
The ones mentioned above are just a few benefits. Among others, it is worth mentioning a simpler management of approvals, deadlines and contract renewals, as well as maintenance planning and malfunction management.
Digitizing processes with a workflow system brings a decisive improvement on all fronts: quality and quantity of time, productivity, better performance and higher security in the global management process.
To conclude, by adopting an advanced flow management tool such as Deepser, which also offers ITSM functionalities, a company will be able to promptly meet its constantly changing business needs.
Find out more about Deepser Flows.