Research finds IT support positively transformed by pandemic as challenges accelerate innovation and agility
Satisfaction with IT service desks improved in 65% of businesses following COVID-19 lockdowns; rising to 72% in public sector organisations
14 September 2021. The perception of IT support has dramatically improved thanks to the successful response of service desks to the pandemic, lockdowns and working from home. According to new research from the Service Desk Institute (SDI), sponsored by Sunrise Software, 65% of organisations said that the overall business now has a more positive view of IT support, with just 4% seeing a decline in satisfaction. This rose to 72% in public sector organisations, where only 2% say perceptions had worsened.
Emphasising the importance of keeping organisations operational, 61% of respondents in the research had supported key workers during the crisis, increasing to 83% in the public sector.
The research underlines that the challenges of the pandemic acted as a catalyst for wide-ranging, deep changes in IT support which are expected to be maintained at pace. It led to accelerated digital transformation, greater use of collaboration tools and new, more agile ways of working that provide a platform for continuing change.
The increasingly positive view of IT support extended to users, who now rely on service desks to support them when working from home in a hybrid working environment. Respondents to the survey said that 62% of end users now have an improved perception of IT support, with a further 22% reporting that satisfaction was already high pre-pandemic and remained so.
Over 9 in 10 (92%) of those surveyed said their organisation had adapted very or reasonably well to home working, underpinned by the assistance delivered by IT support teams. This was down to careful planning – 70% said they were well prepared for the switch to remote working for both users and IT support staff alike, although 32% would have liked to have tested plans more. 91% of respondents said that IT service staff had adapted well to the transition, despite previously being used to working together in the same physical office.
“The pandemic caused immense disruption and suffering across the world, but also forced traditionally planning-driven IT service desks to push out transformation almost overnight,” said Tessa Troubridge, Managing Director, Service Desk Institute. “The switch to different ways of working removed barriers and meant that the pace of change and adoption of new practices was turbo-charged. Thanks to this, IT service management is now recognised as business-critical by both management and users alike. Moving forward, keeping this proactive focus is vital as organisations become more digital and reliant on IT in a fast-changing world.”
Post-COVID organisations are using the momentum to drive their strategies to meet changing needs. 47% of all organisations (and 59% of the public sector) are focusing on ‘shift left’, enabling more efficient use of resources as end users solve basic or common issues themselves through access to knowledge and automated processes. In turn, the service desk team can then reprioritise, focusing on more complex issues or strategic areas. Nearly half (46%) said they will continue to move forward at the same pace and be more agile in how they operate after the pandemic.
The research also found a direct correlation between the flexibility and level of configuration of the IT service management (ITSM) tools respondents used and their success at supporting users during the pandemic. Of those that had significantly tailored their ITSM software to meet their individual needs, 86% said it met their requirements during the transition to homeworking and beyond. In comparison, just 60% of those with difficult to configure tools said they met their ongoing requirements. Given the high possibility of future disruption, ensuring ITSM tools are configured to meet needs and easily adapted is therefore business-critical.
“As a supplier to service desks across the UK we saw how IT stepped up to the challenge of the pandemic, pushed sometimes untried processes to the fore and effectively enabled every key worker and employee with their own personal digital transformation,” said Geoff Rees, Director of Sales & Operations, Sunrise Software. “Mobile technology, collaboration tools, self-service, automation and flexibility (not to mention solid Wi-Fi) all became part of day to day working, and it seems a lot of it is here to stay. As an industry, IT support learnt a lot and should be proud of the part teams continue to play in supporting organisations as we move out of lockdowns and into the future.”
As part of the research, respondents were asked for their insights into how the pandemic affected the service desk. Comments included:
- “Digital adoption took off and security needs were heightened.”
- “Priorities were to retain as close to a business as usual support as possible - and then capitalise on this to improve as we learned and adapted.”
- “It reaffirmed a 'cloud first' strategy, the focus on core services and also increased the reliance on self-service for end users.”
- “The pandemic pushed the need for self-service and for internal customers to take more ownership.”
- “We started using chat bots, automated more processes and stimulated the use of self-service within the user community.”
- “What the pandemic has done is to accelerate how quickly we moved to homeworking and change people's perceptions of it. We are likely a few years ahead of where we would have been.”
- “We learnt to be open to innovation and creativity, always seek out new ways of working.”
The Changing Priorities: The Recovery and Regeneration of IT Service Management report is based on an online survey of 190 IT service desk/IT staff. 56% were in the private sector, 35% in the public sector and 9% were within the third sector (charities, social enterprises and not-for-profit organisations).
A webinar to discuss the findings is being held on 30th September at 11am – to register for this and the full report click here.
Remote Working: The Helpdesk’s Experience
September, it’s the month known for ‘back to school’ and this year it will look slightly different. Not only will the kids be heading back into the classroom, but many organisations are capitalising on this tradition to welcome their staff back to the workplace.
Some will be reluctant, others excited, and many won’t have sat at their office desks since March 2020, the very first ‘lockdown’ – Collins Dictionary’s word of the year.
We’ve heard time and again what impact the last year has had on businesses, staff wellbeing, education, and what the future of work will look like – and rightly so! But we’ve yet to truly examine the effects on the helpdesk.
From their perspective, the word of 2020 was: technology. How they enabled remote working with tech, troubleshooting problems from home, and keeping a workforce online. Let’s delve into the experience of the helpdesk and what a return to the office means for them.
Rescuers in the remote working rush
The reality for many organisations when the call to work from home arrived was that they just weren’t prepared. Not because the business couldn’t run with staff at home, but their technology just wasn’t set up for it.
You can’t just unplug a desktop and take it home, because who’s going to help you set it up when you get there? How can you work remotely when the network isn’t configured for that? What are staff going to do when they can’t communicate with one another?
In the early remote working days, the helpdesk became the rescuers. Perhaps they were sourcing more laptops and imaging them as quickly as possible, preparing systems to ensure safety and security, implementing new software to enable communication and collaboration, or helping staff to correctly set up their remote office. No matter what it was, IT well and truly came to our rescue.
Newfound respect for the helpdesk
Having resolved the initial problems that arose with the rush, we noticed newfound respect for the helpdesk. They’ve been the department shoved into the corner of the office for years, but organisations had their eyes opened to just how important the IT team is for their business – finally!
And you might be thinking, how can you possibly measure this?
Well, typically, organisations invest where they see the importance. And 63% of business leaders said their investment focuses now lie in technology and infrastructure.
Faced with the reality of a disruption to business as usual, relying on the specialists to get the tech prepared for remote working, and ultimately managing to keep an organisation running, it’s easy to understand why.
Experiencing ‘the new normal’
It’s been described as ‘the new normal’: our lives defined by their remoteness. And yes, being the rescuers and respected has been a positive for the helpdesk. But this experience also brought its challenges.
Fixing many issues remote was no different, users were still able to log service tickets, use the knowledge base to troubleshoot their own problems, and seek out help for more complex questions. However, there were some occasions when this way of working just wasn’t feasible.
When it comes to a hardware malfunction, staff don’t have the knowledge, experience, or equipment to fix it themselves. Preparing, ordering, and delivering new technology is a logistical nightmare away from the office. And what happens when a server malfunctions and you’re 30 minutes drive away?
Therefore, many helpdesk teams embraced hybrid working before it became popular. With some staff at home and others in the office, both remote-friendly tasks and those requiring the office were able to be completed.
Helping a hybrid workforce
On the topic of hybrid, while this became the norm for some helpdesk teams, other departments may be embarking on this way of working for the first time in the coming weeks.
So, as the school and office doors re-open, what impact will the hybrid or full return of the workforce mean for our trusty helpdesk?
The move to remote working instilled some good habits into our user base that the helpdesk would more than prefer to keep but doing so may be a battle. For example, uptake in self-service portal (SSP) usage rather than calling/visiting the helpdesk.
We saw staff working outside of normal office hours, in which case, they’d have to log a ticket on the self-service portal for the helpdesk to pick up when online. Will the return to the office spell a resurgence of the typical 9-5 and more calls/visits to the service desk? It remains to be seen. Additionally, the lack of a work phone for some made them more reluctant to call the service desk and more likely to use self-help – winner! But with a telephone accessible on their desk, will this habit continue?
Of course, it will make some things easier. With staff in the office, a hardware malfunction is no longer a disaster. We can fix it immediately rather than planning a date/time to meet in the workplace.
But tracking assets could become a trickier task. Hybrid working will bring a lot of moving parts to organisations: some people in the office, some at home, some travelling, and some visiting clients. Keeping track of who has what and where they are is going to take some planning.
However, these positives and negatives both provide more opportunity for the helpdesk to show its worth. We’ll be the ones facilitating an office return: getting staff back set up at their desks, allowing the business to answer logistical problems like booking desks through the SSP, and providing innovative solutions for a new way of working.
A defining experience
Ultimately, remote working brought challenges for the service desk. Initially, they faced organisational panic as businesses rushed to be operationally sound from home. Then, they reaped the rewards of their hard work through newfound respect and understanding of their importance.
Since then, it’s been business as usual for the helpdesk: fixing problems from home where possible and the office when necessary.
It remains to be seen how the way we work will change as some return to the office and some stay at home. But if we take anything away from this experience it’s that the helpdesk can take on any challenge that comes its way.
Building an effective Service Request process in a SIAM model
Building a multi service provider or Service Integration and Management (SIAM) IT operating model has lots of potential benefits. For example, it gives organisations the opportunity to leverage commercial advantage from multi-sourcing, as well as buying best-of-breed services and ultimately improving the quality of IT services.
However, creating this operating model is not without its challenges. We’ve written in the past about challenges around Service Request/Request Fulfilment processes. This is the process whereby user’s request services from IT. These can be very simple, like a new laptop for example, or more complex “bundled” services, such as a new user, which could comprise multiple hardware items (e.g. laptop, phone, etc.) as well as access permissions and software installations amongst other things.
In a traditional monolithic sourcing model, or one where IT services are all sourced from a single internal provider, these requests are relatively simple to set up and execute.
However, in a SIAM model, they can become more complex, due to a number of factors:
- Different services from different suppliers may need to be integrated to form one of the bundles described above
- There may be numerous steps involved in approval of the request which will need to be orchestrated ahead of submitting it to the supplier(‘s) work queue.
- There may be numerous fulfilment steps, some of which serial, and other’s parallel.
Here’s how we normally tackle this type of challenge.
We recently worked with two clients who both had a similar challenge; How to build an effective Request Catalogue in their Service Management tool.
In order to deliver this work, we followed a tried and tested approach which includes:
- Mapping the workflow for each request type by identifying the following requirements:
- Business approvals
- Technical approvals
- Fulfilment/deployment steps
- Using a simple spreadsheet to log this data enables us to spot opportunities to rationalise approval or deployment steps. Often, clients can’t explain why a particular request requires 5 approvals, other than “it’s always been that way”!
- The completed spreadsheet provides the basis to categorise requests which can then be grouped together on the user’s request portal.This will make them easier to locate.
Other aspects to consider are:
- Entitlement
For each request type, is there a level of entitlement which may prevent certain user groups from being able to order that particular item? This can be enabled in the tooling through menubased options, or from a more sophisticated perspective using details of the user’s role or department from their ITSM tool record / Active Directory records. - Options / Variations
For each request type, there may be a number of variations which can be requested. For example, if a user requests a laptop, there may be a small version for travelling staff, a standard model, and an enhanced specification for power users. - Sequencing
With regards to the approval and deployment tasks, consider the sequencing in terms of whether they are performed in serial or parallel. It is important to streamline the end user experience of requesting IT services from the catalogue. - Adoption
Consider the adoption strategy, through a combination of communication, incentives, and engaging with key influencers in the user community to spread the word.
If you are considering building a Service Request Catalogue, contact Syniad IT to discuss your unique requirements.
6 Ways to Improve Communication and Collaboration within your Remote Team
As we take our first tentative steps into a strange new post-pandemic world, it is clear that remote working is here to stay.
Companies across the globe are realising the many benefits of remote teams, including lower overhead costs, more flexible hiring opportunities, and an autonomous and self-motivated workforce.
Working with a remote team can be challenging. However, by promoting effective communication and collaboration strategies, remote teams can be efficient, productive and successful.
Here are a few tips to help you better manage your remote team.
Maintain visibility
Transparency is a key factor in your remote team’s success. Creating clear guidelines for what is expected from team members and what they should expect from the company is essential, including:
- Collaboration standards and company policies – Set expectations by establishing the culture and the ground rules up front. This may include guidelines and documents for remote workers detailing what the expectations are for their work, how to communicate with other team members, instructions on how to report errors and conflicts, and other company protocols.
- Clear project goals and milestones – For example, through weekly check-in meetings where team members get together to discuss their progress on projects and goals from the week before, as well as what they plan to accomplish in the next week. These meetings are not only useful for communicating tasks, but also for providing each other with feedback on any issues that might have arisen in the past week and acknowledging anything that was done well.
- The tasks and responsibilities of each team member – Avoid missed tasks and uncertainty by ensuring that everyone knows exactly what they should be doing.
- Availability and workloads – Sharing calendars helps teams keep track of one another’s work hours and capacity.
Establish communication standards
Efficient systems of internal communication help to keep everyone on the same page, leading to a more organized workflow and reducing the need for time-consuming meetings.
When managing remote teams, it is essential to establish clear channels for different types of communication. For example:
- Microsoft Teams or Slack for quick messages, team discussions or social interaction
- Email for longer communications that do not warrant a meeting
- Video conferencing for daily stand-ups, weekly check-ins, and team meetings
- Project management tools for task assignment and project-specific feedback
As much as remote tools help us to stay connected, there is also the danger of communication overload. Being assaulted by a cacophony of pings, rings and buzzes from various sources is not conducive to productivity.
Be sure to make time for uninterrupted work by allowing staff to specify offline focus blocks to get work done.
Set clear boundaries to promote a healthy work-life balance
In a Work from Anywhere era where technology creates expectations of constant accessibility, the divide between home- and office life is steadily eroding.
When ‘getting off work’ means walking from your home study to the living room, it can be very difficult to make the mental switch between office hours and personal time. For many employees, this can result in a sense that they are never truly off duty.
According to Mental Health America’s 2021 Mind the Workplace Report, 1 in 4 surveyed employees are experiencing severe signs of burnout, with 83 percent of respondents stating that they felt emotionally drained from their work.
To preserve a healthy work-life balance within remote teams, it is important to set clear expectations around working hours and response times for digital communications. This may include setting guidelines around:
- Turn-around times for specific communications, e.g., 24 hours for emails
- Expected work hours (accommodating for different time zones)
- Expectations for sending and responding to communications outside of working hours – this could include establishing company-wide accepted acronyms, for example NNTR (No Need to Reply), RWA (Reply When Available), etc.
- Escalation and response protocols for emergency situations or urgent communications
Keep an eye on employee well-being and mental health
While some employees adapt well to a work from home environment, those who thrive in a busy office environment may feel disconnected from their team members and struggle with feelings of isolation and loneliness.
You may not be able to connect with colleagues in person, but there are ways to improve personal connections and create a supportive work environment within remote teams.
- It’s okay to not be okay – We are all navigating unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety due to a prolonged global pandemic. Work on breaking down any stigmas around discussing mental health issues within your team. Building a supportive and safe environment that encourages trust and openness will help you to better understand and address the challenges your team members are facing.
- Create opportunities for social connections – This could be a dedicated non-work channel where team members can share interests and chat informally. Or perhaps making an effort to celebrate colleagues’ personal milestones and achievements (remember when we used to have cake in the office?).
- Try team building exercises – Yes, team building exercises have a bad reputation for being timewasters, but they can also be a good way to establish rapport between team members and boost morale. Steer clear of mandatory team building or social activities though. Nobody wants to be forced into a Zoom trivia quiz when they have an important deadline looming.
Arm your team with the right tools
If remote work has been the norm within your organization for a while, the expectation may be that everyone is sufficiently set up and au fait with remote technologies by now.
The truth is that everyone has a different learning curve and adjustment periods may vary from person to person.
Check in with your team to make sure they have the all the resources and knowledge they need to perform their tasks smoothly. This can extend beyond your tech stack and may include anything from ensuring everyone has good office chairs to providing training on effective time management.
Shared knowledge
Increase efficiency and reduce confusion by creating and maintaining shared documents where everything is stored in one place.
Ideally, you should set up a shared folder in the cloud for all your collaborators to work from. This way, everyone always has the latest version of the document and there's no confusion about who has what file. In addition, this approach removes the need to send emails back and forth with attachments and allows for real-time editing.
Knowledge Management best practices
If you’re looking for a way to decrease the amount of time spent on recurring calls, investing in Knowledge Management is a great strategy. At a modern service desk, employees resolve calls using a collective knowledge base. Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel to close similar incidents, they help customers in a way that is smart and efficient.
Why is Knowledge Management important?
At TOPdesk, we cut resolution times by 25% when we implemented Knowledge Management best practices. Our best practices are all about utilizing a Knowledge Base to its full extent. It is a great asset for many reasons. Not only can your team access the information they need to solve calls quicker, but you can also motivate a service desk culture based on sharing knowledge and working together, which massively helps team spirit and allows for more fun at work.
These are the benefits of knowledge management
Think of knowledge management as physiotherapy:
you need to work hard with some tough exercises at first, but the long term benefits are infinite.
What is a Knowledge Base?
A Knowledge Base is essentially exactly what it sounds like: a place where your very capable service desk’s collective knowledge lives, neatly organized into targeted articles. You can use knowledge items to quickly solve calls without asking a teammate for help, or even to publish to your users so they can solve simple issues themselves. You may know this as Shift Left.
This here is a knowledge management best practice process flow. As you can see, there are two different paths you can follow here. We can call it the short arm and the long arm. In the short arm, you find help with solving your issue in the Knowledge Base, and you can take a nice, easy shortcut. However, to get to a point where you can use the shortcut every time, you need to go through the long arm a couple of times first – and you do this by following these Best Practice steps:
1. Search the Knowledge Base first
Always, always, always search the knowledge base first, even if you know the answer. First of all, it saves you time typing out a response. But secondly, if it is not there, you now know you need to add it, or edit the topic.
But assume an incident is logged and you need to deal with it, but you don’t know the answer. The first place to go to should be the knowledge base. Maybe this problem has been encountered and solved before? In that case, you can easily just copy and paste the solution and close the ticket, or follow a step-by-step. If not, make a note to add an item (however brief) once you solve the call.
2. Correct the Knowledge Base
If you find that the knowledge item is lacking something, make sure you fix it straight away. This way, your knowledge base becomes a continuously updated hub for all knowledge in the Service Desk. Maybe you are using a quicker solution than is already posted. Why not help your team members by adding this solution?
3. Solve the call
Now, potentially armed with some new knowledge, you are ready to solve the call. While doing so, keep an eye and an ear open for anything in the solution process that deviates from what was stated in the knowledge item.
4. Close the incident
You fixed the incident and can now confidentially close the call. Once you do, see if you can add to the answer in the knowledge base. Maybe you need to fix a typo, or the solution needs an update, or the article could do with a screenshot for extra clarification. Even small changes could be helpful.
Just remember that knowledge management is a continuous process. If you are just implementing it, then you are going to have to go down the ‘long arm’ a lot of the times at the start. But as more and more solutions are added, the whole team can take shortcuts to solve incidents quicker by going down the ‘short arm’ more often. Think of it as physiotherapy! You need to work hard with some tough exercises at first, but the long term benefits are infinite.
Share knowledge better in your organization
Want more inspiration on sharing knowledge? Download our Knowledge Management e-book for tips and tricks and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.
Freshworks and Pink Elephant EMEA Join Forces To Provide Enterprise-level IT Service Management
Pink Elephant EMEA becomes a Freshworks-authorized reseller and implementation partner to bring refreshing IT Service Management to elevate employee engagement
Pink Elephant EMEA, a global IT Service Management specialist, has today announced a partnership with Freshworks Inc., a leading software company empowering businesses to delight their customers and employees. The partnership will enablePink Elephant EMEA and Freshworks to provide their IT Service Management (ITSM) know-how and deliver the intuitive consumer-grade user experience employees now expect.
Freshworks’ ITSM solution, Freshservice, enables customers to achieve greater visibility, intelligence, management, and control of their IT service management. Freshworks is synonymous with powerful and intuitive customer and employee engagement software that provides quick and strong ROI for businesses of all sizes looking to engage with their customers across multiple touchpoints. Pink Elephant EMEA will utilise its 40+ years of experience within the ITSM market alongside ITIL best practices.
With Pink Elephant being able to provide Freshservice along with its own services, organizations will be empowered to unify service delivery for employees at all touchpoints with flexible, out-of-the-box, practical solutions that improve business efficiencies.
Gijs-Jan Huisman, Managing Director at Pink Elephant EMEA comments, “Customer and employee experience continue to be a top priority for global businesses and a key element of each digital transformation journey. Pink Elephant has always been at the forefront of the development and implementation of Service Management processes and technologies. Our new partnership with Freshworks will strengthen our ITSM Technology service offering that we can provide to our clients. We are excited about this partnership and we look forward to helping customers pursue new growth opportunities and digitally transform their business”
“Freshworks makes it easy for businesses to delight their customers and employees. With Pink, enterprises can now get out-of-the-box ITIL-aligned ITSM solutions powered by Freshservice. Our solutions are scalable and cost-effective to support enterprise-wide IT requirements,” said Hervé Danzelaud, VP - Channels and Alliances at Freshworks. “Freshservice’s user-experience focused Service Management solution is exactly what we have been looking for to complement our portfolio. This allows us to provide a right-sized solution for organisations, from SME all the way up to top end Enterprise organisations,” says Misha Macinski, Business Unit Manager Technology, Pink Elephant EMEA.
For more information, visit www.freshworks.com/channel-webinars/pink-elephant-emea-announces-its-partnership-with-freshworks/
About Freshworks
Freshworks makes it fast and easy for businesses to delight their customers and employees. We do this by taking a fresh approach to building and delivering software that is affordable, quick to implement, and designed for the end user. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks has a dedicated team operating from 13 global locations to serve customers throughout the world. For more information visit www.freshworks.com.
About Pink Elephant EMEA Pink Elephant is a global Service Management specialist helping organisations accelerate their implementation of Service Management best practices through our training, consultancy, IT Support and ITSM technology services. Our ITSM solutions support our clients with their end-to-end (Enterprise) Service Management initiatives by connecting People, Processes and Technology. Expect more. Expect Pink. For more information visit www.pinkelephant.co.uk
Why a dirty CMDB is so bad
SITS exhibitor Snow Software have written a blog about why it is vital to maintain a complete, accurate CMDB.
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Like many areas of IT operations, one of the cornerstones of successful software asset management is having accurate asset data in a central repository, also known as an asset repository. From a SAM perspective, that means discovering and identifying all devices across the entire IT estate and then accurately identifying the software installed and used on those devices (and, increasingly, the software not on those devices that is still being consumed by the end user, like SaaS products).
Organizations tend to overlook software asset management CMDBs since a SAM program is unlikely to need the same data found in a mature IT service management tool’s configuration management database. However, organizations should consider the risk of data duplication between a SAM asset repository and a CMDB and the risk of data either being incomplete or inaccurate. An incomplete, inaccurate CMDB is often referred to as being “dirty."
The issue with dirty data
While a CMDB is most often associated with an IT service management solution and ITIL requirements, the key to creating a solid and valuable CMDB is populating it with current, complete and accurate information tied to the IT assets and users across the network.
The requirements for maintaining a clean CMDB are similar to a SAM repository. But, it’s harder to achieve than you might think - take a look at some of the reasons below:
- Most inventory solutions are not good at covering multiple platforms - meaning you either have holes in your IT inventory or have to use multiple discovery solutions. Using multiple discovery solutions will report assets in different ways.
- Software recognition is often poor in most inventory solutions. This populates the asset repository and/or CMDB with a lot of noise that offers no value to ITSM or other IT functions.
- Limited understanding of how software is installed. For example, an application that is installed stand-alone will be licensed differently than if it were licensed as part of a suite (e.g. Adobe Photoshop vs. Adobe Creative Cloud).
- Limited usage tracking. Knowing if a software application has been deployed is one thing, but understanding if it is actually being used, provides value that helps the decision-making process around cost-saving initiatives such as license reharvesting.
Populating an asset repository or CMDB with dirty data creates more problems than it solves. According to a 2020 Gartner study, 99% of organizations using CMDB tooling that does not confront configuration item data quality gaps will experience visible business disruption. The same study implies that nearly 1/3 of CMDB challenges stem from data completeness or quality concerns.
It's a matter of trust
The concept of the CMDB is that it should be a single source of truth that is accessed by multiple systems and functions to power effective processes and decision-making across IT and business functions.
However, when CMDB data is bad or dirty, trust in the accuracy and value of the CMDB is quickly eroded, often leading to the failures described above. Unfortunately, once SAM or ITSM provides dirty data to another department or senior management, it is hard for the recipient to trust future data. Even if the data quality is improved, it will still be received with skepticism and perceived as untrustworthy.
Inconsistencies with CMDB data will result in stakeholders not wanting to use the data. It can also lead to your team manually making adjustments, and in turn, creating more data issues from human error.
Having unreliable data can end up costing the organization a lot more time and money than necessary, often requiring managed services or specialized consultants to own and deliver the desired value. Organizations often inefficiently consume resources to improve the quality of the data, instead of trying to find the root cause.
Improving the quality of your data
As a rule of thumb, a common target we see for CMDB and asset repository accuracy is 97%. It is generally accepted that 100% accuracy is near-impossible at any one moment. By having just a 3% margin of error, any inaccurate data will be identified and rectified within a reasonable timeframe with a more realistic risk/reward balance for the organization.
A good place to start when looking to improve the quality and value of the data in the CMDB is to put in place best-of-breed technologies to populate the desired data. Using the example above, in the case of IT assets, this means implementing:
- An inventory solution or suite using a powerful agent and agentless discovery to identify all IT assets in your environment, includingdesktop and server, and also mobile, cloud, virtual devices and SaaS. In the hardware asset management realm, you might also include network devices such as printers, switches, and routers and even IP telephones.
- A software recognition service to accurately identify all commercial software in use across key platforms, such as iOS, Windows, UNIX and Linux. The software recognition engine should be clever enough to automatically group bundled software and suites where appropriate, as well as identifying upgrade and downgrade rights associated with particular licensing schemes.
- Full software usage tracking.Did you know that the average desktop is home to around $300 USD of unused software? Only by tracking the actual use of applications can you implement effective software reharvesting initiatives. Software application usage also provides light to the types of programs employees are using whether at home or in the office. Occasionally, these programs may pose a security risk to an IT environment whether the risk stems from having known vulnerabilities or exposing PII data to other unauthorized systems or users.
- Full "normalization" of data.Whether using one inventory solution or several, it is increasingly important that raw audit data is cleansed and normalized before it is used to populate the CMDB or asset repository. This is critical to avoiding dirty data and ensures that all software is reported in a consistent manner to be managed and assigned more effectively. By having a structured “parent-kid” type hierarchy for software, normalization speeds up the process for the IT help desk to troubleshoot software issues. This hierarchy lets you zoom into specific software versions or stay at the macro-publisher level to diagnose potential problems, like whether the issue is related to a specific release/update or a platform issue.
- Integrations that enhance other systems.By having a clean CMDB, IT technicians can be confident that when they tap into other systems to perform related workflows that the data is good to act on. For example, in the case of reharvesting software, you may rely on the ITSM (i.e. ServiceNow or BMC) or another automation engine (like Snow’s Productivity Optimizer) to trigger a workflow that automatically shuts off access to a license or automatically reassigns a license, etc. Another need may be for a BI team that sits in IT operations to evaluate future technologies that have interdependencies with some of the existing software or replace existing tools. In this situation, the analyst may extract license utilization data to estimate the impact on productivity or capability gaps, etc.
SAM data integration
If all of the requirements outlined above sound familiar, that’s because they are the same requirements that are fundamental to effective software asset management. SAM solutions create and consume this clean multi-platform inventory information every day. But, they can also make that same high-quality inventory data available to third-party systems such as service desks and CMDBs.
Reliable data = improved efficiency
The service desk relies heavily on having accurate data. IT service managers are customer (employee) facing. The organization relies on them having all the information required for users and associated devices. If the IT help desk uses inaccurate data to support end-users, then the following action they take may be ineffective. Having reliable data within your CMDB, SAM and service management solutions will have a positive impact on your organization that keeps the productivity of the business intact. Remember that IT operations' core function is to enable organizational productivity that in turn serves the end customer. If a marketing technology goes down, then marketing can’t reach new customers; if sales can’t access their CRM, then they can’t work on opportunities; if finance can’t access reporting, then the company is flying blind.
When the IT service desk is called to act, there is an impact on someone’s productivity. That’s why mean time to repair (MTTR) is a metric that the IT organization tries to keep as low as possible. Having a clean CMDB directly ties to that objective; as well as the other side of the coin of maximizing service availability.
Thanks to reliable data, the service management function can provide an intelligent service to end-users, improving a user’s experience and resolving issues are in an effective and timely manner.
Adding value
Having a proactive relationship between your service management solution and your SAM tool puts you in a prime position to add real value to the organization and align to the CIO’s top transformation goals. With everyone in IT/Infosec’s duty to maintain a secure IT environment, it’s important that the sources of data the organization uses to gain visibility are accurate and trustworthy.
By using SAM-ready data to populate the CMDB, IT operations reduce the chances of "dirty data" and at the same time extract the value of the CMDB as a single source of truth. Consistent, reliable data moving forward will help banish inconsistencies and prove to other areas of the business that SAM data is king.
Snow ITSM Enhancer can fuel your CMDB with accurate discovery, inventory and data normalization across more than 700,000 software titles. See how you can put that data into action by integrating it with your ITSM platform, including ServiceNow, BMC, Cherwell, Topdesk and others.
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This article was originally posted on snowsoftware.co.uk on 25 May 2021.
6 high value use cases driving automation adoption
All too often, the Kelverion team hear that businesses are trying to deliver more services with less resource, all whilst meeting tight Service Level Agreements. There are many automation use cases to relieve this pressure, and this article explores the six use case examples driving automation adoption within service management.
Joiners, Movers & Leavers
Joiners, Movers & Leavers (JML) is one of the most painful tasks for overloaded service desks to process. The creation of accounts for new employees or temporary workers, adjusting access for users moving roles and terminating IT accounts for those departing your business are labour intensive activities that require senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform.
The delays inherent in manual fulfilment cause huge business impacts when new starters don’t have the access they need and security risks as user access is not removed on the date someone actually leaves the company.
Using a self-service interface, the Personnel Department or Line Manager can submit requests to onboard or off-board someone; the automation platform then executes all of the JML IT actions required, automatically, in minutes.
Office 365 Management
Office 365 saves companies the headaches of operating Exchange, SharePoint and Teams infrastructure. However, the management of users and permissions is still laborious; from creating users to adding users to groups, assigning a license, to disabling a user, the automation of these tasks releases pressure on the service management team.
Like JML, Office 365 Management requires senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform. The key is to provide a self-service interface for anyone to submit requests, controlled via an existing change management approval process; the automation platform executes the Office 365 Management requests automatically in minutes.
Standard IT Tasks
Many day-to-day standard tasks are completed manually by IT staff. Even in the unlikely scenario that the workload of this isn’t an issue, these tedious tasks will be impacting the morale of the service desk team, whose time could be spent better elsewhere.
Adding Users to Active Directory Groups, stopping and starting a virtual machine, diagnostic actions such as a ping or traceroute check and remediation actions like restarting a Service; these standard daily tasks can all be easily automated.
Virtual Machine provisioning
Using virtual machines to run different operating systems, test applications and back up data has been game-changing for IT agility, but manually creating and managing these VMs takes time. Automating the provisioning of VMs is another instance of where automation can save your organisation time, money and speed up delivery from days to minutes.
Virtual machines are built and managed securely through self-service requests, ensuring that IT remains in control of these assets.
Patch Management
Patching servers is critical to ensure that IT infrastructure remains secure. However, completing patching manually is complex and time-consuming. Most organisations have a combination of Windows and Linux operating systems and have struggled to find a patching solution covering both platforms. In addition, monthly patch deployments can be an unreliable process; it is, therefore, essential for a reporting function to identify when a patch deployment has been successful to ensure that servers remain secure and compliant. Automating Patch Management allows teams to schedule patch deployments, manage exceptions and patching issues rather than every single patch deployment.
Self-Service Software Delivery
Our final automation use case example is; the automatic installation of software. Requesting the installation of new software and fulfilling that request in an enterprise setting is a time consuming, labour intensive and slow process. It typically involves the user raising a call with a helpdesk to log the software request; the request is then processed and allocated to a senior member of an IT resolver group to add the end-user to a software deployment tool group to action. This can and should be automated.
Empowering the End-user
One of the most exciting advancements in automation is the implementation of the self-service portal. All the above use case examples can be completed by the end-user; via the submission of the request through any self-service portal.
Not only does this reduce call volumes, but it also delivers a modern experience for the end-user, something which is becoming expected in the workplace and will exceed the expectations of your internal stakeholders.
About Kelverion
Kelverion specialises in Service Request Automation and offers organisations automation solutions, integrations and supporting services. Kelverion’s solutions wrap around your existing ITSM tool and enable organisations to harness the power of automation in the service management space without changing your Service Desk, delivering a 400% return on investment over the first 12 months. For more information or a demonstration, please get in touch or visit www.kelverion.com.
ITSM tool implementation considerations
I’ve been involved in selection and implementation of numerous ITSM tooling projects over the years. Typically, managing the implementation and configuration on behalf of the customer, acting as their trusted advisor, and managing the day-to-day work of the Systems Integration partner.
I’ve become involved more and more with the selection and implementation of ServiceNow and have become familiar with the questions asked by the Systems Integration partners when seeking the customer’s requirements, so that these can be converted into configuration requirements.
I’ve assembled a list here of the common data sets and items that customers are asked for. Much as I love working with the Systems Integrators, they commonly expect these things to be in place and will often take what they are given without question.
Some of these items are “big-ticket” issues which will need considerable effort to resolve. My point is that these should be addressed before the tool is about to be configured, not during the configuration process. If the latter approach is adopted, it’s likely that the quality of the implementation will suffer from poor data or the implementation timelines will be extended.
- Ticket categories – how will the tickets be categorised in terms of the impacted item, e.g. hardware, software, etc.
- Ticket priorities
- Self-service, service request types, workflows and approvals required for each request type
- CMDB (CI types) – What data do you want to store in your CMDB, applications, versions, relationships between CIs, perhaps hardware too (Servers, etc.)
- Incident and Problem workflows (when does an incident “become” a problem, and what data needs to be carried over from one record to another
- Incident and Problem record statuses (open, in progress, awaiting, closed, etc.)
- Master Data (Users, locations, and associated SLAs)
- Reporting (internal and external facing reports), e.g. “live” dashboards, regular reports, automated distribution via email, etc.
- SLAs, for service restoration and ticket resolution, both customer and supplier facing
- Knowledge articles, and permission groups for read/write access to each type of knowledge article (e.g. customer facing, internal 1st line, internal 2nd line, etc.)
- Workflows for other processes, such as change management
- Approvals for all request and change types, together with an indication of whether there are multiple approvals for each type and the supporting workflow for these
This isn’t a complete list, but hopefully, it should give some food for thought to those on the verge of embarking on a tool implementation, or those in the midst of an implementation project.
Further reading: '10 ITSM Tool Selection Tips' white paper
To find out how we help organisations like yours design and build highly effective operating models, read our ultimate guide to Design + Build
3 top tips for remote access working
Did you know that, according to an Ivanti post, before the pandemic VPNs accounted for 10 percent of all data transmissions, and now they account for over 90 percent?
With this high percentage of people working from home, the need to support them in a remote function becomes even more essential and the capability of remote working is now mission critical, so here are our top 3 tips.
- Secure It
All remote workers require a secure remote access platform, though the security level will depend on the level and functionality of their roles. While outside of the business firewall the most important things to consider are endpoint security, user authentication and access control.
You need to make sure only your employees have access to your system, and the right security will prevent cyber hacks, plus it needs to be compatible with the computing platforms you are using, whether that’s Windows, CAD, Salesforce etc.
This methodology has been proven effective in warding off potential security threats and data breaches.
- Communicate It
The biggest issue we have seen with everyone working from home is that communication doesn’t always filter down, or important notifications get buried in an email inbox. Our sister company Axenisa’s product ENgage! fits well in this arena. ENgage! streamlines the way businesses communicate during major incidents acknowledging and resolving issues faster while reducing their impact on operations. It works remotely informing subscribers of any issues, wherever they are, no matter what department they are in. So even working at home (and not on your emails) you can be notified immediately via your mobile device, so you are able to take action.
- Future Proof It
Future proof your remote working by looking at the needs of your business, does the security need to cover just employees or will customers be accessing certain aspects of your system? Can you update the system as your company grows and evolves? Ask yourself the pertinent business questions and look at your roadmap for the coming years, make sure you build in a remote working policy and a review timetable to keep abreast of changes.
Remote working can have benefits and challenges, but it’s something the majority of us have now had a taste of during the last year’s lockdown. Whether we choose to continue working from home is yet to be seen, but what we do now know is there is the infrastructure, security and ability to make it a successful option in the future, providing a new mind set to flexible working, which can only be a good thing.
Contact MarXtar at [email protected] or call 01256 679550