InvGate Blog

Have you ever stated that you run your IT department “like a business”? If you have, then you’re not alone. Especially after the 2008 financial crisis when most IT departments were tasked with “doing more with less” and cost-cutting and improved efficiency became the order of the day. But, jumping back to this blog’s opening sentence, if you’ve previously stated that your IT department is “run like a business,” do you really have fit-for-purpose IT financial management capabilities? For example, perhaps knowing how much individual IT services costs and how they deliver value to the organization. This blog looks at what IT financial management is and why it’s important.

Topics: IT Financial Management

DevOps, Agile, ITIL, COBIT and what about those ISOs? There can be a lot of confusion in the IT service management (ITSM) best practice world. But here’s the thing – ITIL, COBIT, and ISO/IEC 20000 all complement each other. So, it’s not a zero-sum game. Used well, the three approaches can be blended together to give a real boost to your service and support customer experience. To help, here are three tips on combining ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 20000 that will help to improve your ITSM practices.

Topics: ITSM, COBIT, IT Service Desk

It’s never fun dealing with complaints and customer escalations, especially when things get heated or contentious. But it definitely helps if you employ a consistent approach that ups the likelihood of your complaint-handling success. Here are ten tips to help you handle your angry customers.  

Topics: IT support

Let’s face it. Everyone loves a superhero. The Avengers, Batman, even Mighty Mouse (or is this just me showing my age?). IT departments are generally sources of heroes – our IT heroes. We all know that one person who seems to singlehandedly save the world (or at least the business) day-in-day-out. That person who knows everything about the business and its systems and who isn’t fazed by anything.

Topics: IT support

A solid review cycle is an essential part of any IT practice – with IT organizations that review and improve their processes and practices more successful than those that are stuck in firefighting mode and/or are in no position other than to maintain the status quo. Reviewing the maturity of your IT service management (ITSM) practices means that you get to sense check what you’re doing day in, day out and to look at opportunities for improvement. To help, here are ten tips for conducting ITSM maturity assessments.

Topics: ITSM, Maturity Assessment

Aged tickets hurt IT service desks and their parent organizations. From the business’ perspective, employees struggling for much longer than is acceptable and potentially losing productivity. From an IT perspective, it not only means that we’re failing those we serve, we might also have significant issues with our operations. Hopefully, you found part one of this blog valuable and it’s given you a start on handling your aged tickets. Now, let’s roll up our sleeves and keep up the good work! To help, here are five more tips.

Topics: Help Desk

Let’s face it. We’ve all been there. Attending a service review with a customer only to be faced with an incident or request that should have been sorted out months (if not years) ago. Such “aged tickets” happen for a variety of reasons – complex systems, organizational change, or even plain old “not enough people on the IT service desk.” The reality is that these aged tickets hurt us. From the business’ perspective, they have people struggling for much longer than is acceptable and from an IT perspective it means that we “can’t see the forest for the trees.” To help, here are my first five of ten ways to overcome your aged ticket problem.

Topics: ticketing system, Help Desk, Ticket Management

As you might know, we’ve recently launched a major release for InvGate Service Desk 6.0, featuring a whole new UI for improved organization and tracking of help desk activities. But the ball keeps rolling and we continue to develop new improvements.

Topics: help desk, Service Desk Software, service desk software features, Help Desk, InvGate Service Desk, Service Catalog

Keeping your IT service desk analysts motivated can sometimes be a difficult job. Between the negativity of end-user complaints, the stream of incoming incidents, and the monotony of some service desk tasks, staff demotivation is not uncommon. Don’t worry though, gamification – which essentially consists of merging game mechanics and work – can help you to keep staff motivation levels up.   So, if you feel that your IT service desk analysts are demotivated (or heading that way), unhappy, or simply bored at work, then gamification could be just what you need to inject a bit of enjoyment and fun into their working day. Please read on to find out more.

Topics: Gamification, Service Desk