Transforming From Help Desk To Service Desk - Volume I: Tired of Firefighting? It's Time For A Service Desk.
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

Transforming From Help Desk To Service Desk - Volume II: Beware the Seven Deadly Sins
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

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.
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Transforming From Help Desk To Service Desk - Volume III: Essential Process Automation Capabilities
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.
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Transforming From Help Desk To Service Desk - Volume IV: Getting Self-Service Right with Six Simple Steps
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.
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Top IT Service Desk Issues Facing the Healthcare CIO
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.
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Getting a head start in Software Asset Management - Managing software for improved control, better security and reduced risk
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.
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Delivering High Value in Service and Support
The value proposition for help desks is changing. Instead of merely tactically responding to the unforeseen needs of IT end-users, the future is all about helping organisations get a better return for their IT and related investments. So where are the differences?
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Delivering Value With Automation
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

Delivering Value With Automation - Volume II: Optimizing Your Software Budget
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

Delivering Value With Automation - Volume III: Optimizing Software Management
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

Key Tenets In Service Desk Organization Redesign
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.
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Knowledge Management in the Support Center
Knowledge Management is a methodology for capturing, optimizing, delivering and maintaining a collection of information that provides guidance or action, and is of value to the organization. When a support professional has access to knowledge, they can quickly assist customers with problems and inquiries. As a result Knowledge Management has become an essential practice within today's support centers.
Provided by: FrontRange