The Nature of Service is Changing – Time for MSPs to Take Advantage
It this age of total dependence on technology for business, consistent, quality service is critical. I recently was in a department store and heard an announcement and sales were temporality suspended “due to an IT failure.” The problem was resolved quickly enough—the manager worked with the service desk to isolate and remediate the problem—but it underscores the businesses’ increasing dependence on IT
But that has to change. Since we can’t have IT staff in every location, we need to empower the business staff to deal with IT issues.
Mobility
Just about everyone today has a smartphone or a tablet. These devices are great conduits for resolving IT problems. In the case of a store failure similar to what I discussed earlier, the operator can either call or use an app to immediately communicate the details of the outage, including the location, assuming the geo-location service is enabled on the device. The operator can then interact via the same device with the remote team to resolve the issue.
Self-Fulfill and Call Avoidance
One of the benefits of social is the ability to network with your virtual peers to seek answers to questions. My daughter-in-law, for example, was looking to resolve a problem with some software she used for her students. Instead of calling the service desk, the community pointed her to an update to the software application and she self-provisioned the solution herself, without any impact to the service desk.
Automate Everything
With the explosion in technology and technology usage, IT organizations must focus on the automation of service creation, delivery, resolution and escalation. Once a work process is completed on a regular basis within complex environments, IT must automate the process to allow for it to execute automatically while still writing all relevant audit checkpoints.
Service Desk Staff focused on Service Delivery Not Running a Service Desk
Clearly, the change in business cadence is all about delivering service to the organization’s customers and not just about running technology. Increasingly, service management solutions are being delivered as a service or managed by third parties—all with the focus on configuring, not coding the solution, to meet the organization’s unique requirements.
Complexity Across the IT Service Value Chain
IT Services are becoming increasingly complex, partly due to the accelerated use of third parties for some business services or their components. This added complexity makes it more difficult and expensive to address issues with these services, so it becomes imperative that IT organizations transition from reactively addressing issues to being proactive. This can be achieved with the integration of IT infrastructure tools that monitor all aspects of the service topography, including the partner interfaces, and aggregate the outputs of these tools (metrics, alerts, etc.) related to the services to understand potential performance issues or failures and proactively deal with them.
Changing Role of the Service Manager
The changing nature of the support environment is leading to a change in the solutions needed by service management professionals. Service managers, for example, need a solution to focus on the consumer of IT and not customization of a tool. They will need to configure—not code—process capabilities for their organization without requiring programing, with a high degree of automation and the ability to support mobility and collaboration.
CA Nimsoft Service Desk Delivers the New Service Management
CA Nimsoft Service Desk delivers the requirements of the new service manager. Highly configurable (not programmable) ITIL-based "action driven" workflows accelerate time-to-benefit, reduce ownership costs and make it easy for the IT or business administrator to add, delete and modify workflows as necessary to continuously improve operations. The solution delivers a social collaborative environment with a superior user experience and mobility to support your environment and dramatically enhance your productivity with extremely low TCO.
Opportunity for MSP to Add Value
Service managers are focusing on the delivery and supply of the service to ensure its continuity, integrity and availability, not on the delivery of toolsets to provide the service. By enabling IT organizations to leverage the MSP's service management domain knowledge and experience, MSPs can help eliminate the need for IT to be service management experts and freeing them to focus more on their customers.
Robert E. Stroud is VP of Strategy and Innovation within the Service & Portfolio Management team at CA Technologies. In his role he advises organizations on their implementations to ensure they drive maximum business value. Stroud also helps ensure that CA Technologies’ solutions adhere to industry best practices.
