The Capital G help desk services email, telephone and web support requests for 300 internal customers. Technicians found the incumbent support application “was like a black hole that service requests disappeared into daily.” They constantly battled a queue jumper mentality where employees failed to log incidents, and would pounce on technicians when they were busy working through their daily ”to-do list”. John Gallo, VP, Technology Infrastructure acknowledged, “We were inefficient in a full-time fire fighting mode and nothing was escalated as everyone was on deck to fix everything.”

On Time and On Budget

Mr Gallo reviewed the Service Desk and Change Management elements of the ITIL framework and decided Capital G needed to adopt the guidelines for best practice service management. Help Desk staff submitted five replacement options for the existing tool, and LiveTime was selected based on cost-value, ease of use and simple implementation process. They were confident that LiveTime would allow them to see “the big picture through all the complaints about the level of support the customers were receiving.”

The costs of the non-budgeted LiveTime installation were closely monitored and the implementation was done without onsite assistance or training. Working remotely with the LiveTime support team, Capital G reported LiveTime was up and running quickly and the service they received “outstanding”. “We began our pilot with a department of 20 and within 2 weeks had all staff members utilizing the service desk via the browser,” said Mr Gallo, “We are now able to see ticket status immediately and users can review updates as they are posted to the tickets by the Help Desk staff.”

Business Alignment

Capital G now have the capability to develop workflows that are aligned with business requirements, “Processes such as user access request have been developed into a workflow with approval process,” reported Mr Gallo, “what took weeks before now takes a day or so and would be immediate if approvers processed the requests upon receipt.”

The VP of IT Infrastructure also claims the queue jumper and squeaky-wheel mentality have also been cured as, “No longer is it the individual who screams the loudest getting priority service,” said John. “We are now at the point where we can redesign our use of the help desk from a one dimensional system to a multi-dimensional system.”

LiveTime Service Manager supports industry standards such as ISO/IEC 20000 and best practices such as ITIL to help you develop a sustainable and continuous service management capability. LiveTime Service Manager enables you to demonstrate compliance in most of the mandatory ISO/IEC 20000 Service Management process areas including service level management and reporting, incident, problem, configuration and change management. LiveTime also includes support for budgeting and accounting, and release management.

Best Practice

The ISO/IEC 20000 IT Service Management standard builds on the world-wide success of ITIL and the BS 15000 standard. Unlike the ITIL framework where organizations are free to ‘adopt’ and ‘adapt’ the implementation of the guidelines, the ISO standard contains a set of strict ‘controls’ that must be implemented and audited by an external ISO/IEC 20000 Registered Certification Body before being certified. The benefits of certification include improved quality of service and increased business and customer confidence.

Foundations for the Future

ISO/IEC 20000 forms a foundation on which enterprises can build a common vocabulary and integrated processes. Integrated processes are particularly important in a multi-sourced environment, where different vocabularies and processes can result in misunderstandings, poor hand-overs and service-quality issues.

According to Gartner, “the new ISO/IEC 20000 standard is set to become a cornerstone for improving the management of external service providers.”

Real Business Processes

ISO/IEC 20000 concerns itself with the processes (including the policies, documentation, roles and responsibilities) associated with service delivery and support. There are 21 individual processes contained within eight different process groups. LiveTime Service Manager assists with at least eight out of the thirteen Service Management processes, including:

• Service Delivery Processes – service level management, service reporting, budgeting and accounting
• Resolution Processes – Incident and Problem Management
• Release Processes – Release Management
• Control Processes – Change and Configuration Management

Through automated IT controls and extensible workflows, LiveTime Service Manager will help align an organization’s IT services with the needs of the business and its customers. ISO/IEC 20000 improvement efforts implemented via LiveTime Service Manager can be done with the peace of mind that they have been done with ITIL and ISO 20000 as a frame of reference and baseline.

Intellectual Capital

LiveTime Knowledge Management allows any organization to harness the intellectual capital of its employees, and further reduce dependence on key staff over time. By building a comprehensive knowledge infrastructure, problem resolution is both automatic and timely, thus freeing technicians for more challenging tasks and improving customer satisfaction. Satisfied employees lead to productivity and a subsequent increase in revenue.

A comprehensive knowledge ecosystem also leads to a decrease in the cost of technician training, improved job satisfaction, and lower staff turnover.

Solutions are automatically provided as each request is created in both the technician and customer portal. Each solution can be viewed and applied to the current request at which point the request can be recorded and closed.

Integrated Search Engine

The key function of any service desk is to not only reduce call volume but capture the intellectual capital of the organization so that the information can be reused. This ensures rapid resolution for the customer, reduces costs and ultimately improves efficiency.

Traditional service desk software relies solely on attribute based searching of the underlying database for matching and correlating responses from previous requests. LiveTime takes an entirely different approach, leveraging a modern search engine to correlate responses from the knowledge base against every incoming request. This has many advantages.

Firstly, every request, its corresponding notes and attachments (including Word doc and docx, RTF, PDF, Powerpoint ppt and pptx, Excel xls and xlsx, Visio, Text, HTML and even Log files) are included in the search index. With more information available, LiveTime is able to more accurately determine the best solution for each request. Results also improve over time as knowledge grows within the system.

Secondly, since the search engine has been embedded across every major process, you can use it to search across any type of request, knowledge article, note or attachment to find the specific information you are looking for. You may remember a comment you wrote to a colleague in the past that you need to locate or a specific article with certain key phrases you remember. This also includes all incoming comments and attachments from customers, via email, attachments, customer portal and web services. There is virtually nothing you cannot search using simple key phrases. In addition, the search syntax includes fuzzy logic and Google style term selection, so you can refer to specific attributes within the search criteria using the “attribute:” syntax. ]]> http://www.livetime.com/itil-service-management/service-manager/knowledge-management/feed/ 0 http://www.livetime.com/itil-service-management/service-manager/change-management/ http://www.livetime.com/itil-service-management/service-manager/change-management/#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:19:44 +0000 admin http://www.livetime.com/?page_id=1704

Standardized Change Control

“The Change Management process ensures that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes. This minimizes the impact of change related incidents on service quality. Consequently, change management aims to improve the day-to-day operation of the organization.”

LiveTime Service Manager ensures all changes to the CMDB are controlled and managed in accordance to an organization’s documented change management procedure. Change requests are accepted by the change manager and assigned a priority that determines the lifecycle applied to the RFC.

Business Oriented Life Cycles

LiveTime Service Manager offers granular control over the business logic applied during the change process. The fully customizable life cycles include the assignment of relevant technical staff at each lifecycle stage, which provides easily identified points of contact.

At the final stage of implementing a change, LiveTime’s tight integration with the CMDB ensures configuration management is involved when updating Configuration Item (CI) information.

Planned Outages

LiveTime provides full visibility of current and planned outages to reassure customers about the availability and reliability of its mission critical IT services. Ready access to the post-implementation review dates, promotes an environment of continual improvement for the service desk.

Clash Detection

LiveTime also provides clash detection logic for changes so that the same CI cannot be scheduled for change at the same time as another change is occuring. This greatly reduces scheduling errors within Change Management.

Scheduling

LiveTime provides instant access to all scheduled events with its built-in calendaring system which provides the due dates of requests and forward schedule of changes (FSC) for all change requests. In addition, it displays the resource schedules of technicians.

Together with integrated technician scheduling, LiveTime is able to use the work hours of individual technicians in its request assignment logic to automatically assign the most appropriate technician for the job. This can be combined with other parameters, such as skill set, proximity and organizational unit when determining the request assignment.

Please ensure your spam filter allows email from demo.livetime.com if you don’t receive a response right away. Also note, we filter out registrations from anonymous users.

[contact-form-7] ]]> http://www.livetime.com/sales/demonstration/feed/ 0 http://www.livetime.com/itil-service-management/specifications/ http://www.livetime.com/itil-service-management/specifications/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:45:19 +0000 admin http://www.livetime.com/?page_id=1187 LiveTime is highly scalable and is designed to support hundreds of thousands of users and customers. Designed to run on multiple platforms, it can be deployed on a wide variety of hardware and software to maximize your existing infrastructure.

While LiveTime has been designed to scale vertically and horizontally across multiple servers and environments, only one machine is necessary. As your needs expand, you can add multiple instances and layers across the application stack. These include the Application Server, Database and Web Server. As demand increases you can create clustered environments for even more power and redundancy.

Minimum System Requirements 2 GB available RAM (100 Concurrent Users) 20GB available disk space (1000 calls per month) Java 6 JDK or later 64 bit OS Platforms AIX 5.3 or above Windows Server 2003, 2008 RedHat Enterprise 4, 5, 6 Fedora 12 or above Debian 5, 6 SUSE Linux 10, 11, 12 Ubuntu 8, 9, 10, 11 Solaris (x86,SPARC) 8, 9, 10, 11 Open Solaris (x86,SPARC) 0805 or later Mac OS X (64 bits) 10.6, 10.7 FreeBSD 6, 7, 8 NetWare 6.5 or above HP-UX 10 or above i5/OS v5r2 or above Virtual Appliance VMware Player 1, 2 VMware Workstation 5 or above VMware Fusion 1, 2 VMware Server 1, 2 VMware ESX Server 3, 3.5, 4 VMware vSphere 4.0 Citrix XenServer 5.0 or above Sun Virtual Box 2.2 or above Microsoft HyperV Languages English French German Spanish Chinese (simplified) Chinese (traditional) Norwegian Polish Romanian Turkish Dutch

Databases Oracle 9.2.0.5, 10g, 11g DB2 8.x, 9.x DB2 i5/OS v5r2 SQL Server 7, 2000, 2005, 2008 MySQL 5.x and later Informix DS 9.2 and later Ingres r3 PostgreSQL 8.x, 9.x Sybase ASE 11, 12.x Sybase ASA 8.0 and later Browsers Netscape Navigator 7.x, 8.x Internet Explorer 7.0, 8.0, 9.0 Opera 8.0, 9.0 Safari 3.x, 4, 5 OmniWeb 5.x Camino 2 or later AOL 7.0 or later MSN 7.0 or later Firefox 3.0 or later Konqueror 3.4 or later Google Chrome 1.0 Application Servers JBOSS 3.0 and above Apache Tomcat 6.0 or above WebLogic 8.x or above WebSphere 6.1 or above Sun Java System Application Server 7, 8 GlassFish 2.0 or above Oracle AS 10.1.3 or above ATG Dynamo Pramati 3.5 or above JOnAS 4.1 or above Geronimo 1.0 or above Export Control ECCN 5D992

Newport Beach, CA – July 30, 2009 – LiveTime Software, a leading provider of ITIL based Web 2.0 Service Management and Help Desk Software, today announced its partnership with Spanish IT consulting company G2 Gobierno y Gestión de TI who are based in Mataró near Barcelona. Under the terms of their agreement with LiveTime, G2 will resell LiveTime Service Manager and LiveTime Help Desk in Spain.

“When I first saw Service Manager I was immediately impressed with how LiveTime has simplified management of the service desk in a package that has enterprise-level functionality,” said Antonio Valle , G2 Director. “It’s great to see the use of open standards web technologies as the foundation of their product line – they make installation quick, keep cost of ownership to a minimum and provide a truly open system for integration projects.”

“We look forward to a long and successful partnership with G2,” said Mike Fellows, UK-based Managing Director of LiveTime’s EMEA operations. “Their commitment to the service management market and their experience and expertise will be of great value to our Spanish customers.”

About G2 Gobierno y Gestión de TI

G2 is a Spanish IT Governance and IT Management consulting company that supports customers in the governance and management of IT to help them to succeed in their businesses through optimization, control and (r)evolution of IT. The mission of G2 is to be the customer’s strategic ally in the task of transforming and optimizing their organizational and IT areas, always maintaining the core values that define G2’s brand and professionalism –
commitment, objectivity, honesty and proximity.

G2’s portfolio includes IT Consultancy; Training in IT governance and management methodologies, frameworks and standards; Architecture design and tools selection for IT management platforms; Direction of implementation projects and Implementation of IT Management solutions. For more information visit http://www.gedos.es

Hit the Ground Running

The LiveTime Appliance reduces the hassle and wasted time which is generally associated with installing, configuring, and using a server. LiveTime engineers have tuned every part of the system for maximum throughput, from the filesystem and web server to database caching and fetching.

Strong Foundations

Based on Solaris 10, the LiveTime Appliance benefits from the highly scalable TCP/IP connection stack which has been optimized for short transactions and lower overhead. Additional performance gains in the File System mean that text based searches can scan through millions of incidents and articles with millisecond resolution. All this with complete fault tolerance so the system will always be available.

With 64 bit Java 5 pre-installed, the system can scale to very high loads. With a totally new threading model in the underlying operating system and a specifically tuned version of LiveTime, it is possible to achieve four to five times the number of concurrent transactions than in previous versions.

Best Practices

Your customers demand higher service than ever before, so it is important that your service solution is up to the task. With a built-in search engine, LiveTime provides instant access to any case information and constant monitoring of service level agreements. Customers will have access to their entire support history and complete access to the knowledge base, saving your technicians significant time answering routine questions and procedures. You can also be confident that you are following best practices, as LiveTime is completely ITIL compliant.

Always Available

Not only does the appliance deliver exceptional performance. With models based on both AMD and Intel processors from Sun Microsystems you can ensure that the system is always available. With built-in fault tolerance, all parts of the appliance are constantly monitored. If any part of the infrastructure fails that component is automatically restarted. In addition, standard ECC memory and Chipkill technologies will keep the appliance running and data intact even if a DRAM chip fails.

Each model can be configured as a database server or application server for improved redundancy and failover, or as a single standalone system.

Every appliance ships preconfigured with Apache 2.0, PostreSQL 8.3, MySQL 5.1, Apache Tomcat 6.0 and Java 6. Each system is highly tuned for high concurrent access and fault tolerance.

Syllabus

LiveTime Service Management Essentials provides the foundations required for effective utilization of LiveTime Service Manager and Help Desk. Specific attention is focused on system design as it relates to the ITIL framework, effective Configuration Management System (CMS) design, and its relationship to key ITIL processes.

The course also covers workflow design, teams and technician assignment, with specific examples of simple versus complex design patterns as they relate to Call Centers and Network Operation Centers. Emphasis is placed on reducing call volume by capturing intellectual capital through the effective use of LiveTime’s Knowledge Management system.

At the end of the course participants should be able to effectively configure, manage and customize LiveTime for any organization.

Prerequisites: None

Assessment

1 hour, 50 Multiple choice questions. Pass requires a minimum of 60%.

Day 1

LiveTime System Overview
An introduction to LiveTime, Incidents, Workflows, Teams and Service Level Agreements.

Configuration: Getting Started
Setting up the system for the first time. User authentication, Configuration Management System (CMS) design and the trinity of Configuration Management, Categories, Types and Items (CTI). Workshop: Mapping internal processes to LiveTime
How to utilize LiveTime effectively and efficiently by mapping your internal business processes through a best practices framework. How to design an effective Configuration Management System that can evolve with your business and leverage the intellectual capital of your organization. Knowledge management, solutions and articles.

Workshop: Putting it all together
Teams and logical groupings of technicians, skill sets and assignment. Designing effective workflows and accepting incoming email requests through LiveTime. Exposing users to the customer portal and reducing call volume in real time.

Day 2

Supervisor Training
Managing teams, escalation layers, workflows, assignments and understanding Service Level Management and its relationship to the CMS. How Underpinning Contracts and Operational Level Agreements operate within the context of a Service Level Agreement. Technician Training
Effectively managing incidents, teams, workflows and states. Communicating with the customer, handshaking, solutions and the knowledge base. Escalating an incident, re-assignment and changing CI’s. The concept of shadow CI’s.

User Training
Request management, logging and searching. Knowledge separation, RSS Feeds, Chat and Surveys. Communicating with technicians.

Management Training
Effective reporting on Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration and Service Level Management. Using the built-in reports, requests and filter based reports and designing your own reports using the custom report builder. ]]> http://www.livetime.com/training-and-support/essentials/feed/ 0