Service Management – Does It Know Your Business?

此为我上篇博文“服务管理--服务懂你的业务吗”的英文原文，供参考。

In the many years I have worked with Multi National Corporations (MNCs), I have given my customers and my colleagues and team members the best solutions technology and IT can offer, with well recognized successes and value.  However, the most valuable experience I have gained during those years, is my closest customers sharing and teaching me about the difference between a “Technology Solution”, and a “Business Solution”.  This I hope to share with you in this CIO Express article.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

An engineer writes a “Technology Solution”, whereas a consultant writes a “Business Solution”.

If you can understand this statement above, you can easily see the difference between having a technology solution and having a business solution.  Simply put, a technology solution solves the problem at hand, and to be fair maybe the best solution the engineer can create.  But a business solution considers the business (operations, demands, values, and impact) as an integral part of the solution, presenting a more effective and business driven solution.

“Service Desk Data is a Gold Mine”.

I think most of you share the same awe ( 敬畏 ) feeling when reading this statement from Kato-san (Gamutsoft’s EVP).  To some it may seem a great exaggeration, but to me it is the ultimate value of the service desk, and if successful the tremendous business advantages you can gain from the service desk data, as if you have “struck gold”.

“Is your service desk collecting all the data in the first place?”

I asked this question because in my experience transitioning and transforming service desks in the past, even before the question “how to retrieve and make use of the data?”, there is just not enough data collected by the service desk operation.  Consider the following typical service desk incident flow, and the amount of data that could have been collected.

If you can see the value of the data collected you would immediately understand why I always plan a service desk transformation with the amount of additional data that can be collected.  This is not an easy task because the opposite is often the case, less and less data is collected.  Many businesses make the investment to a good ITSM tool (Remedy, Clarify, Unicenter Service Desk, Siebel, etc.), but when it comes to customizing the tool they could not see the value of the data collected.  At the end minimal data is entered by the agent, and the ITSM tool is reduced to a record of how many tickets are logged and how much ticket remains open.

But I want to tell you your service desk data can help you:

1.     Understand the stability of your IT

a.     Your hardware equipments (data center, network, and client PCs) failure rate, and the vendor’s fix time.

b.     If your software applications often fail.

c.      Your infrastructure’s stability and availability.

d.     Your services stability.

2.     Your Business Dependency on your IT

a.     What systems are critical to your business ?

b.     What is the usage of applications and those fail frequently ?

3.     Your Business Demands

a.     The SLA level you business demands.

b.     The user satisfaction levels and feedback on the systems and services.

4.     Efficiencies of the Processes

a.     Are the current processes efficient ?  or Changing the processes should be priority ?

b.     Bottlenecks and Failure Points.

“Retrieve and analyze the service desk data.”

This probably is the second reason why service desk data is not fully utilized, the trouble of retrieving and analyzing the data.  A typical monthly service desk report involves taking a long time to obtain the data, perform analysis, generate the performance and SLA results, analyze the failures, and create an improvement plan.  ** By the way, do you see why service managers have less than 20% of time to “manage”?  A lot of the time is spent on retrieving the data, analyzing, and making the reports.

Can you imagine a tool that can reduce the time spent on data retrieval and analysis?  Gives you more time to manage the services?  Has the collective experience and wisdom of Gamutsoft’s service management team?

As an integral part of the Gamutsoft Service Desk solution, the Gamutsoft Dashboard tool is designed to streamline data retrieval, data analysis, reporting and presentation, and give service management advises.  The service manager is as if he is backed by all of our service management team, and has our experiences at his fingertip.  The result is more time can be spent on managing the services, understanding the customer’s business, and developing solutions that focus on business improvements.

With the Gamutsoft Dashboard tool, the service desk data can be analyzed and help better understanding of the business and IT operations.  All the business solutions we can develop, and the value we can get from the service desk data.  It is a gold mine waiting for you to struck.