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.
Provided by: FrontRange

As you transform to a proactive service desk, beware of the seven deadly sins that historically plagued help desks, making it difficult to break free from firefighting:

• Growing call volumes
• Increased training costs
• Increased call escalations
• Duplicate effort
• Inconsistent responses
• Long resolution times
• Lost expertise

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.
Provided by: FrontRange

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.
Provided by: FrontRange

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. These systems save lives every day and require robust support and help desk services to ensure they are meeting the unique requirements of clinical staff. Every patient that enters a healthcare facility is affected in some way by IT. When vital information and medical equipment that supports patients are unavailable, patient care is immediately impacted.
Provided by: FrontRange

SAM can deliver significant benefits, but where do you start? Instead of being daunting, SAM needs to be broken down into achievable goals which provide an obvious benefit to the organization. The white paper provides a general overview of SAM benefits and advice on how to tackle the main challenges involved with getting SAM up and running.
Provided by: FrontRange

IT professionals under pressure to do more with less should take a serious look at automating software management processes. The benefits are not confined to cost control. Using policy-based compliance to drive and automate provisioning reduces software management costs while increasing process transparency for governance and compliance. Automating software installation helps service desk agents increase first-call resolutions, reduce labor costs, and increase end user productivity. Using automation to proactively manage software upgrades yields the dual benefit of reduced labor costs and improved availability. In these times of tightening budgets, automating software management is no longer a luxury; it's a necessity.
Provided by: FrontRange

IT professionals under pressure to do more with less should take a serious look at automating software management processes. The benefits are not confined to cost control. Using policy-based compliance to drive and automate provisioning reduces software management costs while increasing process transparency for governance and compliance. Automating software installation helps service desk agents increase first-call resolutions, reduce labor costs, and increase end user productivity. Using automation to proactively manage software upgrades yields the dual benefit of reduced labor costs and improved availability. In these times of tightening budgets, automating software management is no longer a luxury; it's a necessity.
Provided by: FrontRange

IT professionals under pressure to do more with less should take a serious look at automating software management processes. The benefits are not confined to cost control. Using policy-based compliance to drive and automate provisioning reduces software management costs while increasing process transparency for governance and compliance. Automating software installation helps service desk agents increase first-call resolutions, reduce labor costs, and increase end user productivity. Using automation to proactively manage software upgrades yields the dual benefit of reduced labor costs and improved availability. In these times of tightening budgets, automating software management is no longer a luxury; it's a necessity.
Provided by: FrontRange

Read this white paper now to learn about how you can deliver quality service without complexity by using practical and flexible service management automation and known best practices.
Provided by: Numara Software

Read this white paper now to learn more about ITIL V3 service lifecycle processes and how practical IT service management automation for the real world will help you successfully deliver the ITIL processes you need – rapidly and without compromise.
Provided by: Numara Software

The ultimate goal of change management is to continuously align personnel and business processes with technology. This management discipline has emerged in recent years as a critical area for IT leaders at mid-size organizations for three primary reasons: the need to boost IT service quality within complex and distributed environments; the emergence of industry standards; and requirement to comply with government regulations.
Provided by: Numara Software

Tough economic times are upon us, and no one knows how long they may last. As usual, corporate managers will look to IT departments for cost savings. "Many clients can expect to receive mandates from senior executives to cut IT costs as part of an enterprise cost-cutting program," IT advisory firm Gartner wrote recently.
Provided by: Kace

Now more than ever, systems management professionals in medium enterprises are charged with doing more with less. These systems administrators are faced with virtually the same challenges as their counterparts in larger organizations, but without the number of support staff, specialized skills sets and larger budgets that a larger organization can afford. Time spent "fire fighting" across a variety of systems management disciplines, as well as the need to perform labor intensive manual chores, leaves little extra time to proactively tackle other strategic initiatives such as performance improvements or root cause analysis.
Provided by: Kace

Historically, an organization's IT department will focus on cultivating knowledge and expertise within it's own silo. However, as competitive pressures intensify, enterprises are discovering how to leverage this proficiency and apply it towards streamlining the business as a whole. IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions facilitate this process by reducing the technical demands that the IT department faces, allowing them to focus on integrating technology into the business.
Provided by: Numara Software

The term "Configuration Management Database" or CMDB tends to suggest a single entity, whereas in reality most CMDB systems are designed to evolve to support multiple trusted sources across multiple brands and many involve diverse approaches to data reconciliation based on need and objective. Nonetheless many adopters are unclear whether what they have or not is a CMDB and can get a "gold star" only if they meet certain pre-defined, technical criteria.
Provided by: Numara Software

This white paper examines how Microsoft customers are using virtualization technology to simplify their IT infrastructure, IT processes, and save money. It begins by discussing the core savings inherent in using virtualization to consolidate servers and, as a result, how this helps organizations gain significant time, space and power savings, as well as environmental benefits. We then look at additional savings customers are achieving due to the unique way that Microsoft built virtualization technologies into our server and management platforms. Finally, we show how Microsoft enables even further savings through innovative pricing and licensing, which lower both acquisition and ongoing ownership costs.
Provided by: Microsoft

For large organizations whose IT infrastructure includes supporting branch offices or sites, ensuring that the branch infrastructure is optimized can be a key factor in organizational success. This paper will help IT professionals understand how to control the costs associated with their branch infrastructure without compromising business agility, and it will provide insight into three best practices for optimizing branch IT infrastructure.
Provided by: Microsoft

To run a business within a business, IT Service and Support requires firm control over its assets and services. Moreover, fully understanding the location, health and performance of all enterprise assets has a direct impact on the organization's overall corporate financial performance. To proactively manage assets over their entire lifecycle, firms must strive for enterprise-wide visibility and context into utilization, service accounts and historical records. The role of Service Management solutions is to provide this view, and automate and support the processes that enable the enterprise to maximize ROI, improve service levels, streamline service delivery and reduce total costs.
Provided by: TechExcel