IT Management White Papers and Demos

The growing movement to improve IT service delivery and support has led many companies to rethink the structure and composition of their service desks. When planning such a reorganization, IT management must keep in mind that customers of the support organization do not have technology problems, they have business problems. The technology is merely a tool that these users need to use to accomplish a business task. With this in mind, the result is a set of basic principles that should guide organizational design and planning.

Businesses increasingly view information technology as a strategic investment - an investment that is expected to align with the larger goals of the company and deliver competitive advantages. Well-defined IT service management processes ensure that the business is not only ready for change, but that it may take a proactive approach and push for changes that make the company more competitive and profitable.

Service desks can employ the best agents in the world, or run the most sophisticated technologies, but without effectively combining the two, and directing their interactions based on sound processes, they won’t deliver service and support that differentiates. Some service transformation tools, such as remote support, not only improve customer service delivery, but positively impact employees and business processes as well.

This White Paper identifies some of the insights gained from a recent benchmark survey on how globalization drives the need for Professional Service Organization (PSOs) to rely on collaboration and remote service delivery tools like Citrix® GoToMeeting® Corporate and Citrix® GoToAssist® Corporate.

The healthcare CIO is now in a position of direct influence on the quality of patient care. Doctors, pharmacists, administrators and medical research teams are more reliant than ever on electronic information and medical technology. As such, healthcare CIOs are gaining a stronger position to drive innovation, process change, and IT/business alignment. In healthcare, any system that is supporting a patient is not only business critical, its 24x7 availability is more critical than almost any other industry.

TechExcel ServiceWise is a powerful and versatile change management solution that enables businesses to define a framework for managing, tracking, and enforcing their business processes and to ensure that all stakeholders are “in the loop” throughout the change life cycle.

As your business grows, managing IT services becomes more complex and requires a new approach and new tools. A help desk was the right solution in the early days. Users would call with an issue, and technicians would attempt to fix it as quickly as possible. IT was predominately in a firefighting mode and help desk software had a fairly singular focus: tracking incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. In order for your business to scale, you must move from a world of firefighting to one of forward planning and preventative maintenance. If you're ready to shift from reactive technology support to proactive business service support, then it's time for a service desk.

To provide a more proactive mode of service delivery and support, you must avoid committing these sins with your service desk. Volume II of this five-part series explores these seven deadly sins and reveals how they can be avoided or neutralized with an integrated centralized knowledgebase.

Business process automation is a primary driver of many service desk implementations. Large or small, your business can benefit dramatically through process automation, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. While most service desk solutions offer automation of basic repetitive tasks, others take process automation to the next level through business rule designers. The right level for you will depend on the complexity of your business. Volume III of this five-part series explores the essential process automation capabilities that every service desk solution should provide, and how they can be leveraged to streamline your business

Customer self-service is far from new. In fact, industry analyst firm Gartner projects that by 2010 self-service will account for 58 percent of all service interactions, up from 35 percent in 2005. Yet many companies are still grappling with how to get self-service right. Volume IV of this five-part series reveals six simple steps you can take to help ensure customer adoption of self-service processes, reducing their need to interface with live agents and enabling you to focus service desk resources on more strategic, complex issues.