To effectively implement service management software and ITIL service desk, communication between IT and its customers is vital. Merely looking at the business / IT interfaces without going back through the components of the service chain (agreements with Suppliers and other departments that support the services) is not good practice. Today, as businesses evolve and more stringent needs are required, process reviews are taking place and agreements renegotiated with customers.

Defining services to be delivered is the first step to successfully implementing your ITIL service desk.

Large outsourcing managed services companies are very good at defining their services, the time and cost involved. They run it as a business. IT departments often don’t see themselves as a business, just as another part of the company. This is especially true in small to medium size companies.

Setting up IT as a cost centre often changes attitudes and brings focus to defining requirements and meet objectives. However, an IT department often has more leeway with fewer penalties involved. Outsourced managed services with fee paying clients, must get it right. Often financial penalties are a key driver.

A help desk service level agreement (SLA) between the business and the service desk software provider sets the framework by which incidents and support requests are resolved. Today, with the quality of the service management software tools available, there is a good opportunity to define and track SLAs. Due to “out of the box” tools most organisations will have some form of SLA with their customers.

Organisations that are new to measurement will begin with basic “soft” targets to develop a baseline. It is quite common that IT will not publish these targets to the business until they understand what is required to meet the SLAs. It does depend on the maturity of the reporting and processes within IT. Neither IT nor the business will know if the SLAs can be met until reports have been run over a period of time. Over the course of 6 months to a year, with good tracking data, more realistic measurements can be put in place. It does provide a basis for constructive discussion based on facts between the business and IT.

This in fact is a good strategy whether you are an IT cost centre or IT with targets to meet. To agree with the business on SLAs will be difficult if you have not measured previously. If you are a cost centre and have not been measuring your incidents and problem resolution you have no basis on what you can actually provide. This can only be proven through actual measurement results so that action can be taken. For example, it can also be an opportunity for IT to justify additional resources or up skill current resources with the right knowledge to meet the business requirements.

Negotiations between business and IT need real facts. It is of little value for the business to complain about IT not meeting SLAs if the business is not paying enough for resources. Tracking the issues that have been or are being dealt with and how long it is taking to resolve is a basic starting point.

Implementing a service management software tool, getting the facts over time will enable you to implement ITIL service desk and help desk best practice.

Antony Dutton is CEO of Aaromba Technologies. Aaromba uses best of breed technology and methodologies to provide solutions to improve sales and marketing with CRM software, Service Management Software and customer service with ITIL Service Desk and Service Desk Software.

ITIL is the accepted service management service framework for best practices for the provision of Information Technology services and is a basis for aligning business needs with IT.

ITIL was established by the UK government and is currently in its 3rd version. It places a framework around common sense practices, giving people guidelines on the areas they should focus on.

Previous versions of ITIL differ from version 3 in that they had more of a silo approach to process areas such as an incident, problem, change, service level, release and availability. What ITIL service desk practitioners found was that many people remained in their own silo and did not integrate all aspects required to make managing IT a common sense process. For example, many only performed incident management, some only problem management. The intention of ITIL is that everything inter-relates and integrates – you don’t just perform incident management and then leave the remaining aspects of customer service to someone else. Version 3 attempts to better formalise integration of the services that IT provides to the business. It is much more focused on what the business requires of IT and focuses on what services IT is providing to the business.

Today, most businesses these days can’t operate without IT, but IT need to be seen to be providing the right service to the business. ITIL Version 3 is more service focused and advises that organisations should be agreeing with the business about what services they need IT to provide; then look how to implement the right processes – changing and improving those processes based on feedback from the business.

Version 2 processes are still a primary part of ITIL as you will continue to manage incidents and problems, and manage change requests from the business. However, today, the silo approach has been removed and there is more overlap so that people can see how they should be passing incidents, problems, changes and resolutions along the customer service chain.

In the past, whoever was handling incidents could only see the incidents; whoever was handling the problems would only see the problems. There was not an integrated approach and implementing ITIL version 2 was quite easy to do. However, if you view ITIL as a framework, Version 3 makes it more difficult to fall into a single process mindset. Version 3 diagrams are more inter-related and easier for people to see the overlap in functions and processes.

From the ITIL framework, most of the tools that are available try to address the integrated areas of management. Many products are certified to ITIL and Pink Elephant is one such organisation that verifies products support the ITIL framework. However, ITIL is not proscriptive – it doesn’t specify that you need to do this like this. One of the problems people have when they try to implement ITIL is that they expect to be able to pick up a book and say “if I want to manage change within my organisation using ITIL, this is what I have to do”. ITIL doesn’t do that. It is a framework of best practice and it is expected that you take what you need to make sure that it runs smoothly for your organisation.

There’s no right or wrong way to implement ITIL. What that means is that every tool that you look at will be slightly different. There’s no prescriptive way of doing things, and each tool has its own suggested way. The tools do go a certain way towards suggesting how you can manage the various processes, but there’s always an element of needing to fit in with your organisation, within your business practices. This is where tool selection becomes important. You need a tool that is very flexible, because you don’t want to mould your processes to the tool – you want to be able to adjust the tool to your processes.

This comes down to time and money. If you don’t have time and money then you can take a tool off the shelf and be happy with what it does. With time and money you can adjust the service management software tool to your process.

Antony Dutton is CEO of Aaromba Technologies. Using best of breed technology and methodologies, Aaromba provides solutions to improve sales and marketing including CRM software, Service Management Software and customer service with ITIL Service Desk and Service Desk Software.

One of the challenges in implementing ITIL in established organisations is that they already have processes and procedures in place for the business. A new company or division of a company however is in a position to determine the services required from IT, agree service levels with the business and then implement them.

Even though some established organisations have Service Level Agreements in place, ITIL can give suggestions and guidelines to enhance the service provided.

Many organisations have processes in place – many of these having evolved from verbal to paper to system based agreements.

Often implementing a service management software system can be the opportunity to review those processes and put improvements in place based on ITIL. Sometimes it may be as simple as sticking with the process that is working and automating parts of it.

If you are coming from a paper-based system, one of the huge advantages you get immediately from putting in a service desk software tool is that you will get some level of automation. How quickly you can implement and make process gains depends on how easily configured the system is. You need to be able to change rules and change work flows easily depending on feedback from the business.

A flexible system is far easier to automate. The key to good management of a help desk solution is to be able to choose your processes and workflows that are repetitive, automate them and free up your resources for more skilled work. Successful automation allows you to restructure your resources so that you can place lower skilled resources on the front line that pass issues that cannot be resolved quickly to more skilled people.

The first challenge is to define what services you will provide. This is the same whether it is an internal business unit or external customers. Understanding what is needed to provide that service then naturally flows. For example, how many resources are needed? If there are problems or the service needs to be changed, how will I respond?

Once services are defined, service level agreements (SLA) must be established and these set expectations. For many customers, the SLA is often “yesterday or as soon as possible”. The challenge for IT is in understanding all the parts needed to provide that service. What is often overlooked is the flow on agreements that must be in place. You need to understand who are your partners and suppliers that are involved in the service chain and how will they meet your requirements before agreeing to any SLA with the business.

Agreeing service levels without knowing all the facts to deliver a service is a recipe for failure, but unfortunately this is all too common.

For example, if you are providing an email service, supported by an email server. In the event of server failure, your agreement with your supplier is to fix or replace within 24 hours. However, if your customer needs their email back within 1 hour, there is a high likelihood that you will be 23 hours outside of your SLA. In this case, other resources must be considered, such as a backup email server. With the additional server, the cost to provide your email service must increase – based on your customer requirement. The decision then is placed back on your customer with the facts of providing the service. Traditionally, your customers might have had the view that “it just needs to be working” and disregard the cost to deliver the service.

This puts the focus and onus back onto the business: “if I want this, then I have to pay this much for it”. Traditionally, business/customers say “but this should just happen, I’m the customer and it just needs to work”. But they’re not looking at how much they are paying for that service. ITIL best practice highlights the need to get the facts before making any commitments.

Communication between IT and your customers is vital. Merely looking at the business / IT interfaces without going back through the components of the service chain is not good practice. Today, as businesses evolve and more stringent needs are required, process reviews are taking place and agreements renegotiated with customers.

Antony Dutton is CEO of Aaromba Technologies. Using best of breed technology and methodologies, Aaromba provides solutions to improve sales and marketing including CRM software, Service Management Software and customer service with ITIL Service Desk and Service Desk Software.