InvGate Blog

Wow, 2020 is over already. From some perspectives it couldn’t finish soon enough, but we’re proud of the hard work of all the IT professionals around the world in this troublesome year. We’re sure that you and your IT colleagues played a key role in helping your organization to keep going during the first wave of the global pandemic. With all the fire-fighting it might have been easy to forget how the IT community’s combined knowledge, skills, and experiences were, and continue to be, instrumental to business operations and outcomes. We’ve tried to do our bit to help out too, not only through our products and services but also via the sharing of IT service management (ITSM), IT asset management (ITAM), digital transformation, learnings and best practices in this blog.  This looks to be working, with 2020 seeing a 31% increase in traffic to the blog. And, as always, some blogs fare better than others in readerships terms. If you’d like to catch up on any of our most read blogs that you missed, this post lists out our most popular ITSM blogs of 2020. As you’d expect, many relate to the global pandemic and the needed responses.

Topics: ITSM, ITAM

Thanks to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have been forced to undergo rapid transformations in how they operate, including their use of technology. Cloud-based applications, personal devices, and working from home all often become the rule rather than the exception. Now, as things start to settle down (on what is likely to be a long road to recovery), there’s a renewed focus on ways of working and how technology can help to optimize business operations and outcomes. To help, this blog looks at how IT service management (ITSM) can aid your organization’s much-needed digital transformation in the ‘new normal’. 

Topics: ITSM, Digital Transformation

Post-COVID-19 crisis, we – as a society – have a long way to go still but, despite the pain of the first half of 2020, there was a lot to celebrate and to learn from for corporate IT organizations. Hopefully, your IT organization and IT service management (ITSM) personnel have reflected upon what were probably miserable times on a day-to-day basis to see just how many challenges they responded to. It’s good to call out these successes. But it’s perhaps even more important to understand the learnings and to build on them as we all go forward into what will be the “new normal” for IT service delivery and support. To help, this blog calls out some of the key challenges faced by IT organizations, offering a key piece of learning for each.

Topics: ITSM, COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis has been a big challenge for most organizations, with the need for suitable technological capabilities – to enable the new ways of working – a significant part of the various solutions employed to address its impact. This in turn places a heavy reliance on an organization’s IT service management (ITSM) capabilities and the ITSM tool that enables them – especially for IT support. Of course, a big part of an IT service desk’s success is the people they employ and the processes they use. But the other factor that helps to lift an IT service desk from good to great is the use of a fit-for-purpose ITSM tool. And by “fit-for-purpose,” we don’t just mean that it offers all the required ITSM capabilities but that it delivers against all that the IT service desk needs – from the ease of use, through making changes (including upgrades), to the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Topics: ITSM

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

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

Selecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool is a major project (and a major investment). It’ll impact your IT service desk, your technical support teams, and your end-user community. To help, here are ten tips for picking the right ITSM tool. Tip #1: Figure out what you want Know your organization and plan accordingly. What will you need the tool to do? There’s a huge difference between just doing the basics of incident, request, and change management and implementing a complex set of ITSM practices. Do you want a CMDB? What about problem management? So many people say they want a tool to “do ITIL” but the reality is that only the most mature organizations will ever have the need for support for over thirty ITIL management practices. Also, understand your business and create a plan based on your reality – not what the ITIL textbook says or what ITSM tool vendors are trying to sell you.

Topics: ITSM, InvGate Service Desk

Who knew that there are so many situations in IT service management (ITSM) where – for whatever reason – it’s easy for people and organizations to think that something is different from the reality. It might be that something is considered too hard to do or that something simply doesn’t need to be done (because something else is being done). After writing a first blog on the topic, we decided that there was a need for at least two more blogs outlining some of the common misguided ITSM expectations. Here’s the second. And this is the third blog, where we take our growing list up to nine examples of where people’s assumptions or expectations are different to the reality.  

Topics: ITSM

In writing our first blog that looked at three commonly-held incorrect assumptions and IT service management (ITSM) expectations gaps, we realized that there are many more situations where – for whatever reason – it’s easy for people and organizations to think that something is different to the reality. Maybe that something is too hard to do or that something simply doesn’t need to be done. Hence, we decided to write two more blogs on the topic, with this blog looking at three additional misguided ITSM expectations.

Topics: ITSM