For the last few years, employee self-service access to IT services has been offered as up as a key way to reduce costs, speed up resolution/provisioning, and deliver a better service experience. According to both North American (HDI) and UK (SDI) data, over 80% of IT support organizations have already invested in some form of IT self-service technology. It all sounds great until viewed through the lens of benefits realization, when – according to SDI research – only 12% of organizations have realized the expected benefits from their investment in self-service for IT.

Topics: ITSM, Self-service

Continual service improvement (CSI) has unfortunately been a long-neglected area in IT service management (ITSM), sometimes viewed as the ultimate post-success undertaking (“We’ll get to that once all of the planned work has been completed” – which is shorthand for “never”). With the publication of ITIL Practitioner, CSI as crucial capability has become significantly more prominent, but the results could often be better. This blog explains why and what to do about it.

Topics: CSI, Continual service improvement, ITIL, ITSM

These days, most IT service desks are facing the pressures associated with the need for “doing more with less.” And if you want/need to tackle a growing ticket workload while still delivering an exceptional customer experience then, as well as introducing productivity enhancing capabilities such as automation and self-service, you will need your IT service desk agents to be on top of their game.

Topics: Service Desk, IT service management

It’s been a hectic week for the team here at InvGate now that we’re back from the Service Management World conference. We’re still distilling our notes and following up with the folks most interested in our approach to Service and Asset Management. We’ve also gathered our initial thoughts into something that makes sense collectively, and we’ve taken those insights to our developers so they can crank out great new features that mesh well with the needs of front-line IT staff. All of this introspection sparked a thought from us; why not share our notes from the field and insights with you? So here you go, a collection of thoughts from our team and our partner, QuestDesk.

Topics: ITSM, partners, ITAM, service management

Knowledge management is a capability that every IT department knows it should really be engaged in. However, it’s often something that works its way down to the bottom of the IT service desk to-do list. This probably happens because people are too busy “fighting fires” and the value of knowledge documentation is not seen immediately.

Topics: ITSM, knowledge base

Is your organization thinking about introducing a business relationship management (BRM) function and role(s)? If so, you might be surprised to know that it’s not that new for IT service management (ITSM), with both ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 (the international standard for ITSM) introducing the BRM role and process back in 2011. This recognized the changing role of IT service delivery and support organizations and the need for a “mechanism” that brings together the wants/needs, capabilities, and expectations of IT service consumers and providers.

Topics: BRM, Business Relationship Management, Service Desk

In my last ITSM 101 blog, I wrote about five ways people commonly misunderstand and misuse ITIL. From overly focusing on the processes, through expecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool to fix everything, to running large projects (or programs) that take too long to start to deliver value. In this blog, I offer up five more common ITIL mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Topics: ITSM, ITIL, Service Desk

If you follow Twitter and read blogs about IT service management (ITSM), as I do, you will probably have read lots of complaints about ITIL. And yet most of the IT organizations that I work with use it as the basis for how they run IT, and it seems to work very well for them. So why are there so many complaints? Well, when I read the complaints, they almost always seem to be based on a distorted view of what ITIL is, or what it says you should do. So, before you complain too, think about my first five examples of ways that people misuse or misconstrue ITIL.

Topics: ITSM, ITIL, Service Desk, Request Management, enterprise service management

Having visibility into the work of the support team and how internal service orders are managed is one of the main purposes of a help desk. We all want to know who did what, at what time, and how long it took, to have an accurate picture and be able to make smart decisions based on data. The Time Tracking feature of InvGate Service Desk enables you to know all of that and, in addition, provides you with enhanced budget control and forecasting capabilities.

Topics: Time Tracking, Help Desk, Business Analytics, data analytics, Technical Support, Request Management