I N C I D E N T A L S

From Help Desk to Service Desk

It's all about Service

In general, an IT help desk is staffed by individuals who receive emails or calls from users that require assistance. These requests propel the help desk staff into fire-fighting mode, as they work to resolve the user issues. A service desk ideally moves the inefficient and reactive help desk process, to a proactive, highly productive and efficient service, which becomes more cost-effective over time.

A service desk designed with ITIL initiatives uses a standard set of best practices for lowering costs and improving the quality of IT service delivery. The aim of a service desk is to act as the operational interface between the IT organization and its customers, for achieving an organization's goals.

As a LiveTime Help Desk customer, you maybe wondering how this translates for your IT organization, and what LiveTime has done differently between the Help Desk products and Service Manager application that ensure the service desk support is proactive and cost-effective. To make a relevant evaluation, the Help Desk product can be compared to the Service Manager application with the Incident Management process. Although this is by no means a complete Service Desk, greater flexibility and increased control is gained over the Incident Management process.

LiveTime Help Desk includes a fully customizable workflow and the capability to configure multiple service level agreements. This means that all user issues can potentially follow the same workflow lifecycle, however the pressure to resolve the incident is dictated by the SLA resolution time assigned to the task.

However, Service Manager takes the workflow and SLA integration a step further, as it includes unlimited incident workflows. This means, your organization can apply custom built workflows to match any type of service request that may arise within your organization.


When a workflow lifecycle is created, a SLA is first assigned to the workflow to set the required resolution time of any request that uses the workflow. Then as the stages of the lifecycle are created, LiveTime ensures that estimate times for all stages of the workflow do not exceed the resolution time of the SLA. This ensures that all incidents adhere to the resolution time of the SLA, guaranteeing your service desks meets it contractual service agreements. If any breaches do occur, they are recorded against the incident and can be acted on by the Supervisor or Service Manager.

So where the help desk products possess all the elements for providing a support service, the service desk tightly integrates the service process, be it incident management, problem management, change management with the workflow and service contracts, to ensure customer requests are managed inline with their expectations.

For a comparison between LiveTime Help Desk, Support Desk and Service Manger features see our comparison table.

Tips and Tricks

Assign Service Level Management process

For Users to access the Service Tab to create and edit SLAs, OLAs, Underpinning Contracts and Workflows, they need to be assigned the process. To enable the privilege for a User, open their User Information screen and select the SLM process.

Control SLA timers

To manage auto-escalation and prevent service level breaches, each stage of a workflow can be customized to be an 'Active State' with the 'Timer Active'.

• Active State - Means that requests that move into this state are active in the support system. Time may or may not be recorded in this stage of the workflow, as it depends whether the 'Timer Active' has been enabled. An example of an Active State with the Timer disabled could be 'On hold - pending customer feedback'.
  
  


• Timer Active - Means the state is an 'Active State', and the SLA timer records time against a request when it is moved into this stage of the workflow.

Hyperlinks

To provide easy access to information outside of LiveTime include links in text fields for Articles, FAQs, Item Details or Incident descriptions by adding http:// or https:// and the full link path.

Item Relationships

Version 4.0 allows LiveTime users to build visual maps of item relationships. Item icon: Within the Item Category screen, an appropriate icon can be uploaded to represent the Item Category in the Item Map.

Build an Item Relationship Map: Within the 'Relationships' tab of an Item, the map can be built. To navigate a map, click on the Item icon to display the Item details. Reading an Item Map: Children of a selected item are displayed to the right of that item on the map, while Parents of an item are displayed to the left of the item.

LiveTime Out and About

Service Desk and IT Support Show

Once again, at the end of April LiveTime Software will exhibit at the Service Desk and IT Support (SITS) Show. So from April 24-26, 2007 you will find members of the LiveTime team at Booth 630, showcasing LiveTime Version 5.0.

Dr George Vossos, CTO of LiveTime Software will present the paper, "How to improve the efficiency of your Service Desk by integrating Service Level Agreements with Workflow and Escalation."

Next Release....

What to expect in version 5.0

Functionality to look out for in version 5.0, due for release mid-year:

• LiveTime Help Desk v5.0 - is a consolidation of LiveTime Help Desk and LiveTime Support Desk into a single product. This means former Help Desk users now have access to invoicing and customer forums, while Support Desk can access purchase orders and asset management integration.
• Mixed Mode LDAP - LiveTime is now able to authenticate both Users and Customers using a combination LDAP/ADS and LiveTime internal authentication.
• Internationalization - LiveTime Users will be able to fully customize the language strings used throughout the application by defining their own external language mapping file using any text editor.
• LogInventory Asset Management Integration - LiveTime's AMIE engine has been extended to integrate with the LogInventory Asset Management System.
• Customer Portal Enhancements - LiveTime's Customer Portal interface has been significantly improved to make it easier to navigate and track customer related information.
• Spell Checker - Users and Customers can now opt to spell-check their work before saving.

The cost of non-automated processes

An overview of ITIL terminology and what it means

Research results in the UK are likely to be indicative of a global trend, where 60% of companies are risking effectiveness by using manual IT helpdesk methods to gather asset information.

Read more...