The importance of ITSM

Charles Cyna, President and CEO of ThinkITSM, explains why making a mental transition and focusing on quality can make a huge difference to IT help desk reports.

“The benefits of seeing information in a simpler format provides clear results”
-Charles Cyna

A major international accounting firm found they were focusing on quantity versus quality when it came to producing reports from their IT help desk. In addition, senior management were looking at a way to track IT performance against goals and the time to build the KPI's in Crystal was considered cost prohibitive. The problems were compounded with unique measurement requirements from every IT department who need to see predominantly the same information, but just for their sphere of influence. The impact was that one person spent nine days per month producing reports in Crystal, exporting them to Excel and massaging the information to get the right look for every department. Even more troubling was that the reports that were being delivered were not easy to interpret and as such would often go unread.

They found a solution to these challenges with ThinkITSM Coach, which provides a unique spin on business intelligence for IT. Rather than create Crystal Reports, ThinkITSM Coach ports their help desk tool data into a three-dimensional OLAP cube that is accessible via any web browser. The advantage of a cube is that view of information can be manipulated on the fly to allow multiple views of information in the same time it would take to load a single Crystal Report.

The firm was attracted by the consortium that ThinkITSM has assembled where leading ITSM and ITIL practitioners were charged with building metrics that would be easily consumable and show information in a way that can be easily acted upon. Whereas they used to produce a monthly 'book' of reports, now each department can go online and see the information that is relevant to them, as well as providing much of the same information in a single screen. Additionally, the concept of Wisdom Windows has been introduced, which analyzes the information in the chart and provides recommendations as to why certain performance benchmarks might be changing.

"The benefits of seeing information in a simpler format provides clear results," describes Maria Ritchie, a former help desk of the year award winner. "We often struggled identifying the critical few from the important many and ThinkITSM Coach really does a great job in making help desk reports relevant."

Some of the challenges that organizations face when implementing such a solution is in making the mental transition from a quantity mindset to one that focuses on quality. Organizations have often been producing the same reports for over 10 years and find it difficult to break the volume habit, even though managers often never even look at the information. Moving to a solution like ThinkITSM Coach asks you to re-think why you are tracking information on your help desk and what decisions could be made if the information was easy to understand

BIO

Charles Cyna, President and CEO of ThinkITSM, has 14 years plus experience in the IT service management industry. In 2007, Cyna started exploring ways that organizations of any size could reduce the cost and complexity involved in delivering IT.