By Ed Caufield, Distinguished Alumni
and Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

There’s a great quote from the cult movie Matrix: “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” As our experience working with a recent client, a $1B service company shows, this truism certainly applies to the realm of IT Service Management (ITSM). Here’s what happened…

The company’s IT management had called us in because they were growing increasingly frustrated with what they assumed was a broken help desk. The problems they were seeing included late tickets, incomplete tickets and aging tickets not being worked on. Major issues were not being properly escalated and their “VIP” customers were not receiving any special treatment. In sum, the entire help desk function was wildly inefficient, extremely unproductive and lacking transparency to the issues or trends at hand. Not surprisingly, customer satisfaction was low and going lower.

By Ed Caufield, Distinguished Alumni and
Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Pop quiz: What’s the most important reason to put IT Service Management (ITSM) in place? Because you want to…

A. Transform your organization from a reactive operational team to a proactive customer-focused team
B. Start using repeatable processes to deliver services more efficiently to your end users
C. Create visibility and transparency for both end users and IT services leadership
D. Uncover hidden problems
E. Increase customer satisfaction

Answer: Any of the above! These are all key benefits of ITSM. Which one is “most important” depends entirely on your organization’s needs and goals.

By Ed Caufield, Distinguished Alumni and
Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Andy Warhol once said, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” But as any IT manager will tell you, sometimes when you do change things, things don’t go as planned or envisioned. Trying to avoid having changes go wrong and then analyzing the situation when they do is what Change Management and Problem Management are all about.

In the first article of this multi-part series on getting the ITSM (IT Service Management) basics in place, we focused on Incident Management. Incident Management is about prioritizing and addressing “incidents,” which is what happens when something in your environment breaks. In this article we will discuss Change Management and Problem Management, which are the next two logical steps in the IT Service Management process.

By Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Many organizations think the process of getting a robust IT-related Knowledge Management system in place is too costly and time-consuming to make it worthwhile. Which is quite ironic, given that cost and time savings are the main benefits these systems provide!

What is ITSM Knowledge Management?
In the context of IT Service Management (ITSM), Knowledge Management is a formal process for gathering and analyzing knowledge related to your IT systems, and then making this knowledge readily available to help desk personnel and, often, end users, in the form of written articles and/or video tutorials.

Once you have Incident Management,Change Management and Problem Management in place, implementing Knowledge Management is usually the next logical step in getting the ITSM basics in place and continuing to add value.

By Lonnie Sanders III, Associate

Quick! If you had an urgent need to know the details of the routers at your Cleveland facility, or exactly what sensitive company information can be accessed from a company laptop that was just stolen from a hotel room in Shenzhen, how long would it take you to access this information?

If you have IT Asset Management in place, you can pull up the necessary data in a matter of seconds. Otherwise…well, whether or not you’d be able to find this information at all is anyone’s guess.