Five steps to cost-effective IT service management

While it’s true these departments are under pressure to boost service performance and cut labor costs, it’s a pipe dream to think they can simply go out and purchase “flip-a-switch” IT service management (ITSM). Truth be told, turn-key ITSM doesn’t exist. Even the high-end service management applications marketed lock, stock, and barrel by BMC, CA, HP, and IBM require expensive add-on consulting services to implement the applications to customer needs and to tweak and tailor them over time.

LANDesk addresses a key component of service-oriented IT management – change, configuration and release management – from start to finish, all from a single provider. LANDesk’s solution doesn’t lock a customer into a particular vendor. It enables organizations to implement customer-oriented IT one step at a time while leveraging existing tools and practices, rather than requiring a radical, comprehensive change.

Agility and execution is king in the mid-market

Generally, small businesses today are less dependent on infrastructure. Their IT requirements are typically serviced by point products that don’t encompass the bigger picture and can’t scale up. At the other end of the spectrum, large enterprises are serviced by the high-end, one-size-fits-all service management model. They use the entire solution suite and expensive consulting services, and cannot scale down.

In contrast, mid-size (and mid-size minded) enterprises operate at a faster pace. They must compensate for reduced manpower by leveraging technology, and their business is fueled more by efficiency than by revenue. That’s why it’s recommended that they establish – on a step-by-step basis – an ITSM foundation of 1) configuration control, 2) full service-desk functionality, 3) asset management, and 4) process workflow automation, without having to lock themselves into a particular vendor or trying to do everything at once.

Step 1: It all starts with endpoint configuration management

At its baseline, pragmatic ITSM requires that an organization have control over the configuration of its endpoint devices. Can IT ensure control over the enterprise environment as a whole with a configuration control / systems management mechanism? Endpoint configuration control is necessary to both evaluate your current environment and to bring it into compliance with your internal corporate standards – including license compliance, regulatory compliance, patch and security compliance, and service management foundations.

This level of control is absolutely critical, and underpins all other activities – compliance, security, data integrity, service continuity, service desk/problem resolution, and capacity planning. If you can’t ensure that the device is properly configured, nothing else matters because you don’t have enough control to move beyond simple break/fix. Let’s face it. If you don’t have configuration control at the foundation, you have nothing.

Step 2: Implement a help desk

Configuration control, or systems configuration management, is the means to establish knowledge about the operating capabilities and functional readiness of the endpoint device or server, and to control that functional state from a central location. These same tools can then provide the inventory scanning, remote control, and other tools in order to fix specific operational failures.

Help desk is a natural outgrowth of configuration control – essentially the face of IT configuration management on the customer side. As such, it’s the first pragmatic move toward customer-driven service management. This group is concerned with break-fix, realizing a “once-and-done” call, cutting costs while boosting operational consistency and proving its value through direct metrics.

The help desk’s primary task is to make sure the technology works as expected. This requires the ability to track incidents, assign them to a technician for resolution, and report on successful resolution. Tracking incidents is how IT knows what tasks customers are trying to accomplish and where IT resources need to be focused to meet those needs. This is not yet service management, but it is an absolute prerequisite to service management, and the knowledge and discipline learned in an effective help desk can later be leveraged to address business-specific needs.

Step 3: Apply asset management

Every business has: a finance group that purchases assets; users that consume those assets; and an IT group that maintains the operation of those assets. However, most businesses don’t effectively bridge asset purchase with asset assignment, or initial costs with ongoing maintenance costs, which is why they struggle to link IT costs with annual budgets. This is one of the great disconnects between IT and the business.

For every IT-related asset, organizations need to know who owns the asset, who is accountable for it (who controls its use), what is the effective cost of ownership and maintenance (and what is the replacement cost), and to whom the asset is assigned (who actually possesses it). Taken to its next step (asset phase 2), IT asset lifecycle management enables both IT professionals and finance departments to use the same set of data to perform their very different tasks. If IT knows who is responsible for an asset, it can determine how fast (and thus how expensive) maintenance for that asset should be to meet business priorities – which enables the business to make decisions on IT priority, staffing, and spend based on real data.

If finance knows how much it costs to maintain an asset, it can work with IT to standardize on lower-cost hardware or software. If finance knows to order new hardware as a function of lease expiration, it can work with IT to pull and replace those machines in an orderly, controlled fashion that has minimal impact on all stakeholders. When those machines happen to be servers, this knowledge can make all the difference in the world.

This is where technology and the business meet, and where real value begins to be evident. This is where the IT department can expose the high costs of maintenance for certain software, OS platforms, or hardware platforms to drive more intelligent business resource allocation. This is moving beyond traditional break/fix and into service-driven management.

Step 4: Extend to service desk

ITSM espouses the human discipline that while technicians are addressing a particular incident and resolving it, they should also see if similar incidents have occurred elsewhere in the organization and try to determine the underlying causes of those incidents. A trouble ticketing or help desk system essentially just tracks incidents, while an ITSM approach groups incidents into problems (infrastructure, patch, security implementation, etc.) and addresses the underlying causes, which are then resolved via configuration management scheduled change and release.

If a business knows what assets it has, how those assets should be configured, how assets relate to each other to enable IT services, and who is accountable for both the maintenance and operation of both the high-level service and the underlying hardware and software, then the business can now move into true service-level management. Once IT services are identified in this manner, the organization can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of both service delivery and service operation. This can then drive plans for service improvement based on clearly understood costs, accountabilities, and requirements.

At that point, the business finally has the foundation elements needed to intelligently plan and implement ITSM and service level improvement as a function of corporate strategy. IT moves from cost-against-product to active partner in developing competitive advantage on a business-operational level.

Step 5: Pull it all together with the power of process control

Adding a layer of automated process control is what pulls all the elements together. It brings a consistent, single driving process that crosses silos, unifies the functionality, and provides cost realization, consistency, and speed to service.

For example, when IT receives a service request to add some software, a process initiates, checking the asset repository to determine if a license exists. Once that’s confirmed, the process fires off a task to the configuration team or executes directly within the systems management application itself to install that particular software. Should a license not exist, the process kicks off a business organization purchase of a new piece of software. Service desk uses the tools, applies human intelligence to make decisions, applies a process to ensure that all data is correctly analyzed and updated, and that approvals are automated in order to make the parts work together more cohesively and effectively to boost efficiency.

This is the power of process. It glues the pieces together to create consistency across the foundation tools. It builds the process-controlled bridges between configuration control and service desk; between asset control and service desk, and between asset repository and configuration control.

Approaching ITSM step by step with the LANDesk® management platform

IT service management fits comfortably in the LANDesk® management platform because managing IT services is achieved through the very capabilities that LANDesk® solutions deliver so well – configuration control, structured asset repository, service desk, and disciplined change management. As mentioned earlier, LANDesk’s solution enables organizations to implement ITSM one step at a time while leveraging existing tools and practices, rather than requiring a radical, comprehensive change.

Endpoint configuration control with LANDesk® management suite

As a configuration control tool, LANDesk® management suite offers remote control and problem resolution, software license monitoring, software distribution, OS deployment and profile migration, inventory management, and support for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.

Inventory management capabilities for example let you discover networked computing devices, automatically maintain detailed hardware and software inventories, monitor software usage, plan upgrades and maintenance, and quickly respond to audits. With software license monitoring you can scan for known and unknown applications as well as define and track unknown applications. You can stop users from launching software with expired licenses, even when they’re not connected to the network. Plus you can maintain a comprehensive look at software license use and easily respond to audits.

Implement a help desk and beyond with LANDesk® Service Desk

LANDesk® Service Desk delivers enterprise-level consolidated service desk capabilities without requiring a large enterprise budget, training or knowledge level. And through integration with LANDesk® Management Suite, service desk teams access the key functions needed to solve users’ issues, including inventory, remote control, chat, file transfer, remote execute and reboot capabilities. Team members can establish and maintain enforceable policy-driven service management and access comprehensive audit tracking and reporting capabilities – making it easier and less costly to remediate vulnerabilities, track transaction histories and eliminate the risk of ongoing failures.

Enable complex audit, compliance and license management

An effective service desk is able to look at both the configuration management system and the asset repository to gather the information necessary to prioritize and deliver the agreed upon levels of service from the service desk. LANDesk® asset management is a combination of asset repository, process automation, and computing device inventory and monitoring tools designed to give asset administrators insight into the current assignment, configuration and operational state of IT and related assets.

LANDesk® Asset Manager functions as an extensible asset repository capable of holding or referencing any kind of data relating to an individual asset or class of assets. It also interacts directly with LANDesk® Management Suite to enable key asset state, software license and current configuration data to be derived directly from near-real-time device scanning on managed computers. This enables meaningful compliance analysis and internal audit support, as well as providing insight into current operational status.

The “glue” that is LANDesk® Process Manager

As mentioned earlier, adding a layer of automated process control is what brings all the elements of a best-practice service desk together. LANDesk® Process Manager lets users create consistent, predictable, automated IT workflows to streamline redundant maintenance tasks to save time, labor and money. Many of the automated tasks customers have established within their LANDesk® management applications can integrate seamlessly into workflows designed using LANDesk Process Manager. In addition, LANDesk® Asset Manager can be used with LANDesk Process Manager to enable access to – and manipulation of – asset data according to well defined, repeatable processes that reflect corporate goals and policies.

LANDesk Process Manager provides the glue, the power, the intelligent coordination across all of these functions to realize pragmatic service management and control of all interrelated processes across the enterprise.

Conclusion

In order for IT departments to cut labor costs while still being positioned to deliver proactive services, it is vital that they adopt an ITSM orientation. In doing so, they become more of a business enabler and less of a back-office support organization. LANDesk is the only vendor offering enterprise-level ITSM capabilities with mid-market affordability.