Hope all you guys are having a great Christmas holiday with family and friends. I know I am – with my family. I also want to say thank you to all our readers and to the One who is the “real reason for the season”.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

ManageEngine announced a managed services edition of their help desk software – ServiceDesk Plus. The new release is a complete web-based integrated package, including incident and service request management, self-service portal, knowledge base, IT asset management, even purchase and contract management. The new software is available in either a Standard Edition, providing the full range of basic help desk management functions, with a knowledge base and self service portal; or Professional Edition, which includes all the features found in the Standard Edition plus complete asset management.

Managed services allow organizations outsource the regular tasks like IT/network/help desk management to third party service providers. This helps those organizations focus on their core business and keep costs low because someone else is taking care of those problems. With the right service levels, managed services can help reduce the ticket resolution times and bring expertise to the table, something which the regular organization does not have to invest in. The service provider, of course, gets the advantage to  share his expertise and costs among multiple accounts getting better ROI.

The new offering from ManageEngine gives the service provider the software to manage the help desk services of multiple accounts. It covers basic ticket management with service levels, knowledge base, self-service portal, asset management. Interestingly, the new edition derives from one of their flagship products that comes ready with ITIL modules like incident, problem and change management. But it looks like the new MSP edition will not have the ITIL modules built into it for now.

A simple Google search will tell you there are many companies who provide such services to their clients. One of them has been quoted in the official ManageEngine press release – “As a Managed Service Provider who has been in the IT helpdesk industry for over 18 years and used a number of different helpdesk applications to support over a hundred customers, we believe that we have finally found a solution that fulfills our requirements,” said Jason Roberts, Technical Manager for TCNS, an IT and Network Support provider. “ManageEngine allows our customers to be kept up-to-date on a three-tier level – telephone, web and email – provides excellent SLA options based on individual customers, allows our technical staff to be kept updated instantly on all requests, and most of all, provides an easy-to-use reporting facility, which can be pre-scheduled, giving me the time to concentrate on other business requirements! It has all the features an MSP needs at a very affordable price. Now I can focus on my customers without worrying about the software, features or prices.”

The economy, rising prices and how-do-you-keep-your-costs-low-question are helping managed services. Companies like ManageEngine make that process easier. What do you think? Do you think managed services in the help desk market will help? Have you thought of going the managed services route or are you already in the path? Let us know. We would love to hear your views.

Cloud-based IT Service Management pioneer, Service-now.com is holding their annual user conference titled “Knowledge” at San Diego on April 18 – 22, 2010 at the Omni San Diego Hotel. The 4th annual conference of the SaaS player will officially start on April 20, with pre-conference sessions happening on the days before. The agenda has not been fixed yet and the call for papers is on.

Last year’s user conference was attended by 300 people, most of them being customers and partners from the Service-now eco-system.

User conferences are a good thing. It brings customers together with both the company and fellow customers. They learn from each other’s experiences and strategies. The vendor gets the opportunity to talk about best practices that can be used in the product(s). Case studies help understand different perspectives to tackle a problem. It can also be a great place for solution providers and partners to highlight their presence and expertise.

Some of the topics that could be covered in Service-now’s conference include:

• Creating a service catalog
• Designing an effective CMDB
• Workflow Automation
• Adopting ITIL v.3
• The full list is here.

I checked with Service-now and they have opened the conference to other vendors and speakers – it is not just restricted to people using/deploying Service-now. That is a good thing because finally the customer benefits.

Other interesting shows that you may be interested in going are:
- HDI’s 2010 Annual Conference and Expo – March 16 – 19, 2010 at Orlando Florida (http://www.thinkhdi.com/hdi2010/)
- Forrester’s Infrastructure & Operations Forum 2010 – March 17-18, 2010 at Dallas, Texas (http://www.forrester.com/events/eventdetail?eventID=2436)
- Interop Las Vegas – April 25 – 29, 2009 (http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/)

More details on upcoming events can be found on our events page.

Spiceworks, the Austin-based free IT management software vendor, is making strides with the release of a new version of its software. The new version – the 17th release from the company – comes with support for larger networks (upt0 1000 computers). To put this in perspective, the previous version supported networks with fewer than 500 computers. Other key feature additions in this version include real-time SQL Server monitoring, enhanced scan scheduling, editable network maps, help desk queues and SSL support.

For the uninitiated, Spiceworks offers free IT management software that lets you monitor your network, manage IT assets and run a help desk. The company claims to have over 830,000 business users in 196 countries worldwide. The software can also be run in MSP mode for service providers who provide network management and help desk services for their clients. How do they keep it free? They run ads inside the user interface.

Some of the features they announced in this release includes:

• Real-Time SQL Server Monitoring – provides real-time monitoring of key SQL Server performance metrics, including transaction load, I/O throughput and disk space consumption.
• Dynamic Scan Control – gives users more flexibility and control over how their networks are scanned, including allowing individual and customized scans by device, subnet and department. Better support for remote locations is also included.
• SSL Support – offers full SSL encryption to provide greater security within organizations and for MSPs and businesses using the software to remotely manage multiple offices and locations.
• Customizable Network Maps – provides the ability to create and view multiple network maps, edit existing network elements and add new elements, change the layout and organization of the elements, and add annotations.
• Help Desk Routing and Queuing – allows users to group and work help desk tickets based on the content or source in the ticket – such as “all printer problems” or “tickets from the marketing organization.” Rules can be based on any data attribute in the system, including title, summary, source, severity, employee, or user defined attributes.

Spiceworks also reached out to its community to add support for multiple languages in the software – 10 languages to be exact including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Danish and Croatian. The Spiceworks community continues to add more languages to the software.

Spiceworks also told me that most Spiceworks users are located here in the USA but they also have users in parts of Europe, Australia, India, Brazil etc.

Spiceworks has an interesting business model when it comes to IT management software and there are a lot of eyes on it to see how it performs. More details on the release here.

So now the proverbial “rubber hits the road”.  You’ve purchased a service desk tool, and you want it to support your ITIL process initiative.  So how do you get there?

This is part 3 of a three part series (Part 1, Part 2) discussing how to “Bridge the Gap” between Service Desks, IT Processes, and Workflow.  Part 3 offers some practical advice on how to get from what the ITIL Processes describe, and really getting the benefit through automation tools.

In the two parts that preceded this article, I discussed the value of ITIL Processes and Workflow.  ITIL Process provides value in the Governance of IT, in their ability to Measure, Control and Enable the IT Service Organization.  Workflow brings business context to the activities associated with completing the process.

So how do we build the bridge between Process and Workflow?  The answer lies in the example described in Part 2, you need to understand the overlap between the activities from multiple processes that may need to be integrated into a homogeneous workflow.

To illustrate this, I’ll take the example of Request Fulfillment, and the Access Management Processes.  The objectives of the two processes are (from, “Service Operations”, 2007):

Request Fulfillment – to provide a channel for users to request and receive standard services; to provide information to users and customers about the availability of services and the procedure for obtaining them; to source and deliver the components of standard services; and to assist with general information, complaints or comments

Access Management – to provide the right for users to be able to use a service or group of services; executes policies and actions defined in Information Security Management and Availability Management

Both these services are clearly separate with differentiated goals and objectives.  The activities for each process have separate roles assigned in a RACI matrix.  However, in practical application, how do our end users typically access both Request Fulfillment Processes, and Access Management Processes?  The answer is, they both are Requests from the customer point of view, and for our business are typically managed in a combined workflow.   The activities encompassed within the work instructions that underlie that workflow will clearly be different; however, the workflow will typically hold many of the same elements.

The next question is how do we define the correct workflow?  Unfortunately, this one comes in part to the standard consultant’s answer of “it depends”.    However, this isn’t as bad as it seems.  It depends on the CMS (Configuration Management System) Tool or Tool-Set you are using.    CMS Tools which encompass workflow management (usually in the form of “Ticketing”), come in two basic flavors:

Status Based – These tools govern the workflow through the agent changing the status of tickets, and having the ability to transfer tickets to other groups or agents.  They have the advantage of flexibility, as the workflow is usually based on some simple statuses.  However, these tools can be difficult to measure, and rely heavily on each individual agent doing things according to policy/procedure/work-instructions exactly the right way, every time, manually to ensure accurate measurements on the performance of that workflow.

Action Based – These tools do not allow the agent to manipulate statuses directly.  Instead, they require agents to take actions, which are made available based on the status of the tickets.  This allows the process owner(s) to essentially encode the process steps, much more thoroughly into the workflow, and provides better governance of the workflow steps for the organization.  Modern service desk systems are moving toward action based models.  They are differentiated by the level of work required to model workflow.  The better systems are entirely driven by configuration data, and require a minimum of programming/scripting of the workflow.

So the implementation of the workflow becomes highly dependent on the tools you choose to make up your CMS.   Choosing an Action Based system will maximize your ability to control the workflow, and accurately measure the effectiveness of your workflow process.     In its simplest form, an action based system will flow much the same way as a status based system.   However, the action based system has much more capability to provide both control of the workflow, in the form of work-rules based on status, and measurement of the specific steps in the workflow.

Returning to our example, modeling the activities to perform the Access Management and Request Fulfillment processes, it is likely that a unified workflow will be developed.  The start of the workflow will be the common request mechanism for the service desk.  From there, based on the request being made, it will branch into workflow that captures the activities of either Access Management or Request Fulfillment.  Furthermore, a frequently implemented request model is for new employees, which will encompass workflow elements from both workflows to fulfill the same root request.

So… to bridge the divide between Process, Workflow, and Tools, one must understand the definition of each.  Once we understand that Workflow reflects our business requirements in how to approach the Activities defined in the ITIL Processes (watch all those key words, its important), we discover that workflow design is the bridge between good Process and the Tools we need to automate them.  The tools will act to define the constraints of our workflow, and our workflow requirements may in turn help define our requirements for tools.

In summary, focus on designing your workflow to suit the tools appropriate to your organization.  Every organization does not need an “enterprise” service desk, but all organizations looking to automate their workflow need to consider designing their workflow to meet their real business needs.  Keep it simple when you start, and allow yourself room for Continual Improvement.  Most of all, focus on good design; the CMS is the ERP system for IT, and as such it is the tool to manage IT’s business, and look for tools that will enable your organizations ability to manage workflow, don’t let your tool manage you!

Guest blogger, Vernon Palango is the Principle Consultant for InteQ Corporation’s Service Management Consulting and Training organization.  In addition, he acts as the primary advisor for implementation of ITIL Best Practices within InfraDesk™, InteQ’s On-Demand Service Desk product.  www.inteqnet.com

In our ITSM Consulting Practice, we regularly work with customers on the implementation of service desk tools.  One of the common misconceived requests we receive is…  “Can you implement the ITIL (name one) process in our service desk tool?”   What follows is that we need to educate the customer that you can’t implement a process in a tool; we can only implement a workflow, and documentation.  The process is larger than that.

Last week, we saw “Bridging the Gap – Part 1: Process and the Service Desk“. This is part 2 of the three part series discussing how to “Bridge the Gap” between Service Desks, IT Processes, and Workflow.  Part 2 describes the role of defining workflow for the Service Desk, and the other “actors” in the service management processes.

Workflow is how we document and automate the day-to-day activities and decision points to achieve the aims of a process.  One way to view it is, that the goal of a process is to achieve specific set of outputs for the process stakeholders, while the goal of workflow is to ensure a set of activities, that may span multiple processes are executed in a specific order.

An illustrative example is in the relationship between Change Management and Release Management.    Change Management is responsible for approving the work to implement a change, and Release Management is responsible for approving a release into production.  These are separate processes, but in practice, they are frequently implemented in a common workflow.   This is part of where the confusion frequently originates, as the workflow in our tools associated with both of these processes is frequently associated with “Change Tickets”.

Structured workflow design has the benefit of developing consistent, repeatable steps for approaching the activities associated with any process.  This is particularly helpful in a process like Incident Management, where the Level 1 personnel may not have deep technical understanding of the services in the organization, but can rely on a well defined workflow to guide them in solving the issue.

ITIL identifies a set of activities to accomplish processes in the form of a RACI Matrix, which stands for:

Responsible – A person or role that performs the activity
Accountable – The one and only one person that ensures the activity occurs
Consulted – A person or role that gives advice for an activity
Informed – A person or role who is given information about an activity, but has no other role

Each process should define all the activities to accomplish it, and the roles that will perform those activities.  This becomes a guide to workflow, but again, is not itself the workflow…  For this we can take the example of incident management.  The standard activities at the beginning of the incident management process are… Incident Identification, Incident Logging, Incident Categorization, Incident Prioritization.  These are the process activities, the workflow associated with this might be Log Incident, Assign to Level 1, and Accept Level 1 Assignment with the underlying work instructions for the Level 1 Staff ensuring that the appropriate process activities are performed.

Put another way, workflow identifies the business steps being taken by personnel acting in a process.  The process defines activities, and the workflow must ensure (usually through work instructions) that all activities are performed by the appropriate roles.

In summary, the workflow puts the activities associated with one or more processes into the context of the business in which it occurs.  The workflow for incident management at a large bank will be much different than that for a small internet hosting company, but the underlying activities to resolve the incident will be very similar, with a very different RACI matrix associated.

Part 3 of this series will give a practical example of how to bridge process, workflow, and the tools we use to automate the processes.   We will describe a common case of the relationship between Request Fulfillment and Access Management as defined by ITIL V3, and show how you would approach mapping the process activities, workflow, and considerations you need to make when applying that to a tool.

Guest blogger, Vernon Palango is the Principle Consultant for InteQ’s On Demand Service Management Consulting and Training organization.  In addition, he acts as the primary advisor for InfraDesk, InteQ’s On Demand Service Desk, clients during the implementation stage. www.inteqnet.com

IT management has become an integral part of any enterprise and the choices that are available out there make it easy for any IT team to keep watch. Vendors like IBM, BMC from the Big 4 league and solutions from the point-product vendors like IpSwitch, Solarwinds, ManageEngine etc. have given IT across the globe the ability to keep track of what is happening in their bedrooms! These tools also become important for the IT support team during incident management or problem management.

Some of these tools have integration for mobile devices, where you can keep track of your infrastructure from your mobile devices. But I recently came across a company that talks about infrastructure management from the mobile device only. RoveIT is a Canada-based company who, as they put it, “helps IT administrators resolve incidents faster, reduce network downtime and maximize IT efficiencies”. They help manage IT infrastructure via mobile devices.

How does RoveIT do it? They have two components – Rove Mobile Admin Server and the Rove Mobile Client. The server component is installed on a server within the enterprise network that connects to the different pieces of the IT infrastructure – servers, network components and services. The Rove Mobile Client is installed on the mobile device and connects to the Admin Server to get information. They seem to have built support for most mobile platforms including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone. The iPhone support was their latest addition into the Rove IT management family. VPN is not required for the connection.

They package it into two packages – basic and advanced. The basic package can be used if you are looking at general Windows management, remote access and basic networking functions. Other platforms and services can be managed in the advanced edition. If you are looking at comprehensive incident management, you may be better off looking at the advanced edition.

Even though the iPhone interface looks better, the company says that the Blackberry option is more popular. That is no surprise considering the high penetration of Blackberry in the enterprise.

Rove IT started out in 2001 and claim to have more than 2500 customers worldwide. Pricing starts at US$295 for the basic edition and $595 for the advanced edition.

It is Friday. And I am a fan of Dilbert toons. Today’s Dilbert reminded me of the often situation some of us find ourselves, when we take a project or a thought or an action plan to our bosses. Well, the good ones would be jubilant (maybe an exaggeration!) and the bad ones would beat the idea down because they feel insecure that someone else thought of something better than them.

Anyways, the toon also reminded me of the how we approach the help desk or ITIL. Documentation, even though a very boring thing to do, can sometimes be a life saver. It can definitely be a time saver for future projects, where teams can rely on wisdom gained from past projects.

It also reminds me of RCA or Root Cause Analysis – it is something that is used in Problem Management. The advantage of RCA gives you all the data you need to find out the actual reason for the problem. Problem management helps in deciding what to do to eliminate that problem completely. The goal being – never let that problem occur again.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

This is interesting. I just made my post yesterday about Social Networking and the help desk and I hear about a vendor who has integrated some sort of social media into a help desk software product. In this case, ManageEngine integrated Twitter with the customer help desk software.

A little background first. When customers feel satisfied or frustrated, they generally vent out their feelings and opinions by calling support or emailing them. If they don’t get any response, they blog about their experiences. With Twitter, it just became easier. 140 characters is all it takes to capture the attention of an enterprise like Dell or Southwest. The Twitter revolution took enterprises by surprise when they were dragged into conversations they never initiated. The 140 characters customers and prospects were tweeting was all over the place and companies found themselves closely monitoring social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn to see what people were saying about them.

Companies like Comcast, Southwest and Dell have been known for tracking conversations in social media that involve their products or brand and responding to these users appropriately. If it is praise, a simple thank-you from the company can go a long way. But when addressing a complaint or an issue, the company can put out the flame before it becomes a fire.

But how do customer service departments keep track of such tweets? You can either hire someone to keep a watch on Twitter 24×7 and there are tools that can help you do that too (like Tweetdeck and Seesmic). But these tools don’t keep track (store) of these customer outbursts (not in all cases). So it made sense for customer support software to keep track of these tweets. That is exactly what ManageEngine is trying to do. ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is a web-based customer support help desk software with request management, contact management, knowledge base, self service portal and remote control. The new version of SupportCenter Plus integrates with Twitter to keep track of relevant conversations that are happening on the social media platform.

Vinu Sreedharan, product manager at ManageEngine said in the company press release, “The new features in this release will help customer service departments reduce that time and increase overall effectiveness.  We have seen ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus transform customer help desk departments and the new enhancements are really our response to customer feedback. We are excited about the new Twitter integration as it allows not just the customer service department to keep track of questions but can also greatly aid organizations in their need to keep track of public image and branding.”

The new software helps support organizations identify and keep track of relevant conversations about their products and/or company. I personally think this is important because channels of communication have really opened up in today’s connected world. Keeping track of all your customer engagements is important and it is just a matter of time, when more vendors are going to integrate these channels into their offerings. This is going to benefit companies and enterprises keep track of all that the customers are saying wherever they are saying it. The best part is that end users are open to use any channel of communication they want and they can expect better customer service from organizations.

Pricing for the new software from ManageEngine starts at US$495 for two support reps.

How is Twitter affecting your organization? Are you seeing your customers use new social media to communicate across to you? If yes, what are you doing about it? Let us know in the comments below.

What would happen if our regular help desk integrated with social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc. Would it be possible? Will it be useful? Will it increase the load on the help desk or reduce it? Will it help the end user or hamper him?

ITIL itself defines the help desk as a “single point of contact”. Social networking talks about collaboration – multiple points of contact. Aren’t they really paradoxical?

Let’s look at how organizations function. They have multiple end users, an IT department with a support team  that helps the end users with most of their IT problems. The end user contacts the support team when he/she has a problem. The support team resolves the issue. And they have a system to keep track of all this work. Most companies are like this. Throw in a few ITIL concepts, and you set up processes for incident, problem, change management. Keep an inventory of all the assets in the organization. Call it the CMDB. And so it goes on..

Now let’s add some of that social networking in there. Let’s take Facebook as our first example. There is no doubt that Facebook is a popular web application and many users spend their daily time on this service. So why not integrate your help desk into Facebook? What does that mean? One possible meaning is that your users could directly report the problem to you via Facebook. So you build an app that integrates with your office helpdesk and users can directly report problems or request services from there. The support team can look into the request and close within the help desk and let the user by writing on his wall. There is one problem though. Would you want to tell the whole world about all the problems you are having at work? Are IT support teams confident to go out in the public space and show the world the stuff they are made of.

Twitter. The user tweets his problem to the support staff. Staff resolves the problem and tweets back. There could be an implementation of this for the intranet, where the user can simply open a common portal and enter their request and hit the send button. Other end users can see the common tweets and they can simply retweet it. So now the IT team knows they have a problem at hand. Yammer is like Twitter for an organization but I am not sure if it can be used as an alternative to a help desk software. It is not going to be easy to convince everyone to tweet their problems, when we are so used to email.

Twitter is already being used by the external help desk or the customer service department. We have heard of how Comcast and Dell have tracked end-user user conversations on Twitter and how this has become a whole new channel of communication for customer service.

Let’s take a look at some collaboration software like Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Would that be useful to the IT support enterprise? They could be used to edit technical documents among the IT staff (Wikis can be very useful for this). The end user can view these collaborated documents and use them to resolve the problem or access the service themselves. The IT team can check out what document has popular demand and take appropriate action.

So let’s come back to our first question – Would it be possible? Yes. But I don’t know of any vendor who has got these features already. The more time people are going to spend on the Internet and the more social networking sites become popular, people will only become more comfortable with this type of usage.

Will it be useful? Yes. But IT teams are not going to want a lot of exposure to the outside world. Most of the requests that come to the help desk and incidents and problems and we don’t want our users talk about our problems in the outside world. But we could try internalize it – use social networking features within the organizations and leverage the power of the cloud within your network.

Will it increase the load on the help desk or reduce it? Will it help the end user or hamper him? It would definitely help the help desk reduce its work load but I think it will only work for help desk that are open to new technologies. Let’s face it – there are many managers out there who are not going to like other people doing their job. But for the open-minded help desk, social networking would be the added advantage.

What do you think? Do you think social networking would help the help desk or the IT support team? Will it benefit the end user? Let us know in the comments below.