4 Steps Towards a Great Service Catalog
This article offers up a quick guide to service catalog success – from getting started, to measuring quality, from checking whether you’re providing services that meet your customers’ needs, to improving your service catalog by matching it to your customer journeys. Get the lowdown here.
How ITSM is Moving Beyond IT to ESM and Greater Business Value
In this article Sarah Lahav discusses the important role that service management has to play in enabling businesses to be more progressive, and shares her thoughts on what IT organizations need to do to be successful in delivering enterprise service management and, thus, increased business value.
5 Simple “Don’ts” for Handling Customer Complaints
Here Stephen Mann takes his latest negative customer experience and turns it into five simple, but practical, pieces of advice for anyone (whether they be in internal or external support) to follow when handling a customer complaint.
ITSM Issues: from Bad Management and Incompetent Advice
Bad consultants, new fads, poor “best practice”, incompetent research, bad managers, and toxic consulting… Here Aales Roos looks at whether your attempts to improve your organization’s IT service delivery and support capabilities are failing because of all of the above.
How to Better Understand the Total Cost of IT Service Desk Tools
Have you ever stopped to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your current, or next, IT service desk tool? Not just the costs of buying the software but the all-in costs of what it takes to make the tool “fit for purpose” and to maintain this over time? Here we outline all the costs that you need to consider.
How Important is ITIL, and Other Certifications, to IT Service Desk Staff?
How relevant is ITIL right now, especially for IT service desks and service desk agents? If you want some hot-off-the-press insight, new research data from HDI – in its 2018 Technical Support Practices & Salary Report – offers two perspectives on the value of ITIL certification to North American service desk agents.
What Could a Regular Huddle do for Your IT Service Desk?
All sorts of businesses are starting to hold daily team huddles and finding that they’re transforming the way they work. Team huddles not already a part of your workplace culture? This article contains everything you need to know about holding a huddle and what they could do for your IT service desk operations.
5 Tips for Creating an AI-Assisted Knowledge Exploitation Capability
How can your IT service desk start using AI-assisted knowledge capabilities to improve the level and quality of its knowledge-sharing success and increase end-user satisfaction? Here we dive into the fundamentals and how to best use this “new” technology.
Modern Service Management and Cloud Services
This article summarizes the 12-step journey to Modern Service Management. It provides useful nuggets of information and takeaways you can apply immediately; with the journey map used to help to prevent and/or mitigate failures and to optimize successes.
Understanding How to Demonstrate the Business Value of IT
In order to understand IT services better, and make the translation into business value, they can be broken down into three groups of properties: better IT services, faster delivery of IT services, and cheaper IT services. Here, industry authority Mark Smalley takes a closer look at these three dimensions.
Tackling Common Knowledge Management Issues for IT Service Desks
Corporate IT service desks have long understood the opportunity, and benefits, of knowledge management, but far too many continue to struggle to make the most of what their service desk agents, and the wider IT organization, already know. The question is: why is this?
Run IT as a Business – 7 Things You Must Do
Here Doug Tedder discusses seven fundamental things that IT must do to run like a business, including: having a compelling portfolio of services and products and exhibiting financial and business acumen. After all, the business of the future demands a technology partner that acts and runs like a business.
The Impact of DevOps on Business Continuity
Agile and DevOps practices are adopted to help resolve complex business issues at speed while still providing an increased certainty of intent, quality, and safety, but have you ever stopped to think about the the impact of Agile and DevOps on your business continuity practices?
Change Approval in ITSM: Roles, Responsibilities & Best Practices
Should the person you’re asking to approve a change request actually be able to stop a change from occurring, even if everyone else agrees it should occur? This article aims to help you understand who in your organization is best positioned to approve changes.
The Current State of 24×7 IT Support
Do you remember the concept of “follow the sun” service desks? An approach to ensure that there’s always an IT support facility available to employees as and when they need it. This article questions how prevalent 24×7 IT service desks – “follow the sun” or otherwise – are in 2018.