So, you want to set in motion a number of improvement activities that will help to take your IT service desk forward in 2019 – but what should you do? It’s easy to think that a new IT service management (ITSM) tool is the answer, but before you run to do this (and you might be surprised that we’re saying this) there are other things to consider first. Here are our 10 tips for achieving greater IT service desk success in 2019.

Topics: Service Desk, IT Service Desk

How’s your IT service desk faring? Hopefully it’s meeting all the agreed service level agreement (SLA) targets, your end users and customers are happy, and so are your service desk agents. Or maybe they’re not and you need to improve your operations, performance, and the perceptions that people have of the delivered IT support capabilities. Looking forward to IT support in 2019, the people who agreed with the former – that everything is great with their IT support capabilities – will still, in many ways, have the same challenges and opportunities as those who agreed with the latter. Odd, I know – with the key difference being that they might be better positioned to address them.

Topics: Service Desk, IT Service Desk, Employee Experience, AI, Artificial Intelligence

Kanban has become a very popular work – or workflow – management tool, especially in the Lean, Agile, and DevOps worlds. It has also found its way into IT service management (ITSM) as a way of providing focus and insight into work jobs/tasks and flows. For example, in managing ticket queues, planned and unplanned tasks, or projects and improvement activities. As well as offering a visual overview of all of the work to hand, it also provides insight into the status of work items and offers motivation to people who can hopefully see their work progressing from left to right – from “to do” (or “to-be-started”) to “complete.” Plus, it allows management to better understand the relative workload levels, blockages, and the performance of both individuals and teams.

Topics: ITSM, DevOps, Kanban, Agile, Lean

We finish 2018 with excitement over all the new features we delivered. Thanks to the support of our growing customer base, we’ve had a highly successful year at InvGate HQ – we’ve launched a new product in line with customer feedback, you helped our software to arrive in new countries, we opened an office in Mexico, and all our internal teams expanded to keep up with customer-demand. Product wise, the last 12 months were pretty intense, which is exactly how we like it - you’ve got to work hard to keep customers satisfied and remain a top player! So yes, lots of things happened in 2018 and so the purpose of this blog is simply to provide a recap on all the major launches, updates, and feature releases we had (you know… in case you missed it!).

Topics: Product News, Product Release, Service Desk

You’ve probably already heard of COBIT – it has been around for a while. If you have, then you might remember COBIT from its days of being an approach that was applicable to those with, shall we say, audit requirements. You might also remember COBIT’s longer name (as was) – “Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies” – which reinforced its audit-based roots. But it’s just plain-old COBIT now. Like ITIL, and the IT Infrastructure Library nomenclature, the acronym has superseded the longer-form name to reflect the evolved focus and scope of coverage. And if COBIT is potentially of interest to you, especially with the new COBIT 2019 recently replacing 2012’s COBIT 5, please read on for 10 tips on how best to start your COBIT journey.

Topics: ITIL, ITSM, COBIT

IT service desk reporting is an essential IT service management (ITSM) practice, which can help to identify troublesome processes, training requirements, customer satisfaction, and more. Most IT service desk managers understand this and make the time for reporting, but often the reports produced aren't as effective as they could be. So, if you’re spending significant time creating performance reports that aren’t being read or acted upon by your department, then it would be wise to look at what your reports contain and how the important messages are delivered. Ultimately, do they hit the mark – and help the reader – or do they sadly hinder more than they help?

Topics: Business Analytics, Service Desk, ITSM, KPIs, Analytics

There’s a lot of interest in enterprise service management (ESM) – the use of IT service management (ITSM) principles, best practices, and technology to help other business functions to improve their operations and results across quality, speed, and cost. But there’s probably even more interest – and this time not just in IT – for digital transformation. Particularly because other business functions such as human resources (HR) professionals, say, are reading and hearing about the need to digitally transform their back-office operations (and will probably have no idea what enterprise service management is).

Topics: enterprise service management, Digital Transformation

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: ITIL, ITSM, CSI, Continual service improvement