Challenge Business people go to IT as a last resort.

The modern employee goes to Google when they have a question and turns to their social networks for support long before they go to IT for help. You’ve established a self-service solution to help employees help themselves, but you’ve found it’s not used. The business users view IT as an obstacle to progress. And when they are able to find it and submit issues, it’s difficult to understand since the solution is filled with IT jargon. This inadequate self-service model shifts the cost burden onto the business community.

Tools lack the proper design for analysts to perform great service.

IT analysts lack much of the intelligence needed to do their job, they do not have a solid knowledge base to work from and they are required to visit many queues to do a single task. Analysts lack information that could provide useful context as part of the resolution process because intelligence is scattered both within the system and outside the system. The process of working a ticket is time consuming. To make matters worse, tools and process are typically focused on narrow service level metrics. This creates an SLA based approach that doesn’t tell a good story to the quality of the service delivered, and almost forces the analyst to focus on the speed of solving an issue, which ends up sacrificing everything else, including their customer’s overall satisfaction and productivity.

Every organization has team collaboration and knowledge sharing, but it’s messy.

Sometimes it is difficult for IT teams to see the bigger picture. IT service management tools rarely include a mechanism for sharing tribal knowledge throughout the ITSM organization while access to the huge store of institutional knowledge isn’t always accessible resulting in knowledge sources that are inaccessible or go stale. Additionally, as time is often of the essence to resolve issues, business user interactions tend to go untracked and subsequent documentation and knowledge transfers suffer. The facts are that many teams have separate systems to manage their work and these systems are not tapped into correctly for the team to work together.

Delivery models are changing.

The days of an enterprise IT environment that is solely internally sourced are long gone. Today, businesses rely on IT services furnished through an increasingly broad set of delivery models and providers. In effect, IT organizations have moved from being not only service providers, but also service brokers, managing an increasingly complex ecosystem of hosting and colocation services, outsourcing firms, cloud providers, managed service providers and so on. These changes necessitate a new level of transparency in the dynamics of financing and enabling IT.

Agility puts a squeeze on the IT Service Desk.

Organizations are demanding more support from a never-ending list of technology and business services, and development is delivering applications and services at a faster, incremental pace through growing technologies like agile. This is putting a tremendous squeeze on ITSM people and processes that are designed on decades old principals and instruments. The core tenants continue to be important: IT productivity, business satisfaction, as well as cost and risk control, but the nature of team execution is changing. Support for greater systematic intelligence and knowledge requiring less process, while having greater team collaboration to share knowledge become vital parts of a successful service support team. Our solution is designed for humans and built for service, as required by the application economy.

Opportunity

While technology has advanced at a breakneck pace, the support services available to today’s workforce look eerily similar to the systems created decades ago. People expect the IT experience to be as seamless, modern, and intuitive as any new operation system or a consumer app. However, in reality IT is an impediment—the hall monitor that slows progress and the adoption of new technology through a complex web of seemingly arbitrary rules and procedures.

Even though ITSM has been around for decades people still navigate rigid processes that are centered on poorly designed forms requesting unnecessary information. IT simply can’t deliver services that connect with people, can’t improve knowledge required to help answer questions quickly and can’t deliver a good experience. Not surprisingly, the results generated by these systems are largely unchanged. Individuals on both sides of the service desk still have too much work and not enough answers. In order to support business growth, provide better customer service and improve workforce intelligence and job satisfaction, we need to provide a better ITSM experience.

CA Service Management places a high degree of emphasis on usability and intuitiveness, presenting information in straightforward, non-technical language. It is specifically designed to promote user engagement, encourage consumption of available IT services and create a more satisfying user experience. So let’s take a closer look at the key stakeholders involved with a service management solution and the types of business value they should receive from the solution.

Benefits

• Don’t skip a beat: Provide business users a simple way to connect with IT and remain engaged and satisfied across the entire service delivery and restoration process.
• Make every moment count: Provide analysts the ability to understand the complete state of the IT environment, a way to prioritize work and the context to make decisions.
• Embrace the team, not the ticket: Provide IT teams with a productive approach to managing services in the connected world. Elevate system and human knowledge to support the business as a united IT team.
• Knowledge for management insights: Facilitate better, more timely decision-making through enhanced data analysis capabilities.
• Better control of your IT environment: Minimize service disruptions with robust change management processes and execution.
• Sum is greater than its parts: Integrate service management with ITOM solutions in order to deliver complete services across the ecosystem.

 

Capabilities

Service Desk

CA Service Management is designed to help analysts make every moment count through a dynamic experience so they can deliver great customer service without the fear of overbearing processes or metrics. With the solution, teams can embrace teamwork rather than working from siloed knowledge stashes and disjointed communications.

Key to delivering this great service is the solution’s new and intuitive xFlow user experience for analysts, which provides more comprehensive and intelligence-based views that analysts, teams and the service desk as a whole need to get their work done. Recently introduced features such as Cardview, Heat and Weather provide analysts with a contextual understanding of their workload based on multiple dimensions, so they can better prioritize their work. Intelligent features such as Service Genius provides analysts with real-time, knowledge-based articles, while the Suggested Experts feature recommends experts best suited to help resolve the issue. As a result, the new xFlow user experience enables analysts to work more naturally in their environment and provide first-class customer service.

CA Service Management is Pink VERIFY certified on 15 ITIL® 2011 processes and provides comprehensive support for incident, request, problem and knowledge management, all of which are underpinned by robust change and configuration management processes. Its service desk capabilities help IT organizations take control of their change-management workflow and standardize their IT business processes in accordance with industry-proven best practices. CA Service Management also helps IT organizations, including service providers, reduce cost and complexity by consolidating multiple or disparate help desks. It delivers extensive support automation tools to more quickly and effectively identify, diagnose and resolve issues, resulting in a higher quality of customer service.

Service Catalog

Enterprise-scale service catalog capabilities give you the ability to define, publish and manage the services you make available through unified self-service, whether they’re associated with mobile devices or any type of business consumer, power or administrative user. You can present services in a consumer-like storefront fashion using consumer terminology, providing all the relevant details a consumer would expect to see when requesting a service, such as options, cost and service-level agreement. You can even publish these services in your own portal in addition to unified self-service. Behind the scenes, workflow automates and manages fulfillment and related processes, simplifying power user tasks and increasing the productivity of all users involved. Additional service accounting features like chargeback enable better accountability and transparency into service consumption and costs, so decision makers can make better portfolio decisions.

Mobility

A native mobile app for iOS and Android™ devices provides access to the unified self-service capabilities, including the consumer storefront of available services. Users can leverage native device capabilities like the camera and location awareness when opening issues. Service desk analysts can manage their ticket queues and all users can manage task approvals, all from mobile devices. For management, optional dashboards can provide real-time analytics exactly when needed on mobile devices.

Change, Release and Configuration Management

A robust change management database (CMBD) enables deep root cause analysis for issues and proactive impact analysis for changes to the IT environment. This, combined with the ability to link services to configuration items, enables your IT departments to plan better, make fewer mistakes in implementation and exercise more precise control of critical configuration items and services. They can also respond more quickly and effectively to incidents and problems in operations.

Underpinning the CMDB is a robust change approval process and a Change Audit Control Facility that leverages rule-based processing to handle unauthorized changes within the environment, thus helping reduce system downtime and minimize impacts to the business.

Business Value and Advanced Reporting

Business value reporting helps your decision makers and power users understand and prove the business value of your service management organization and service offerings. Out-of-the-box reports supply insights into organizational productivity, service demand and costs. They help IT managers gauge operational effectiveness and provide the business impact of service disruptions in dollars.

In addition, advanced ad hoc reporting and dashboard features empower managers to perform more in-depth analysis in order to support tactical and strategic decision making. Non-technical users can quickly create interactive dashboards and reports and immediately share them with the broader user community. The resulting unified view of your service management environment delivers deep, real-time management insight and transparency into service demand, cost, use, assets and issues to users of CA Service Management.

Integration with the Broader IT Environment

CA Service Management includes a robust integration architecture that enables it to contribute to both a larger ITSM vision, as well as to broader IT Operations functionalities. This architecture provides out-of-the-box integrations with application discovery and dependency mapping tools through integration with CA Configuration Automation. The integration architecture allows managers to extend their service management solution in order to better visualize and manage services using application performance and infrastructure domain management systems. As a result, they’re able to build real-time, cross-silo views of services and more efficiently pinpoint sources of service impact and risk.