By Dick Stark

Last Thursday, RightStar presented two back-to-back e-Classes: How BMC Footprints does Service Request Management and How BMC Footprints does Service Level Management. Our objective is to educate customers and prospects how to get more value out of their ITSM toolset investments. In case you did not attend, the following summarizes the excellent training sessions.

Service Request Management. Most organizations do not recognize the role that ITSM and in particular, the IT Service Catalog plays in building value and advancing the stages of IT service delivery.  A well-designed Service Catalog can make a huge difference in customer satisfaction (how IT is perceived by users), efficiency and delivery. For example,  at the recent FUSION 15 ITSMF conference, Coca-Cola was nominated for an award for their “shift-left,” service catalog project completed in early 2015. At the conference, Coca-Cola explained how their new Service Catalog enable users to solve their own problems and gives ITSM users an experience comparable to its employee self-service portal.

Interestingly another FUSION customer success award went to Paychex for its work in Knowledge Management. By making improvements in its KM processes and tools, Paychex enabled its customers to improve their self-service experience.  Additionally, by ensuring that knowledge is current and relevant, agents are more responsive and knowledgeable. The end result is improved customer satisfaction.  Paychex reported that this knowledge project had a bigger ROI than any other ITSM project–ever.

In this eClass, we demonstrated designing and configuring a service catalog using FootPrints.  One place FootPrints really shines is the self-service interface. By making the interface intuitive and self-learning, users can quickly search the knowledge base and submit requests. Since neither requires a call to the service desk, the impact to the organization is significant. One specific “cool” feature is the self-service form layouts.  By creating forms that offer “complete the sentence” functionality, forms can be filled out quickly and easily.  Best of all the use of common language for the end users allows the service desk to categorize and prioritize the incident automatically.

Service Level Management. My guess is that most organizations pay very little attention to SLM, yet SLM is a very important part of the ITIL Service Lifecycle.  How else does an organization know if they are meeting their customer’s or employee’s needs in a timely fashion.  And what specific areas need improvement?

RightStar demonstrated the ease of configuring FootPrints to track Service Level Agreements, Operational Level Agreements, and underpinning contracts. Then we showed how easy it is to set up reports so that SLA metrics are monitored to ensure continual improvement.

The call to action is ensure that our customers and in particular, our FootPrints customers take advantage of the power of the tool.  That is, “get the Ferrari out of the garage.” Technology by itself doesn’t guarantee value. Whether it is establishing a service catalog or just setting up and monitoring service level agreements, IT can and should be a value center that provides tangible and measurable value