The message to IT has been delivered – collaborate and communicate across all departments to deliver seamless, transparent services to benefit the business and achieve its objectives. Ensuring that the organisation has consistent processes that align with the business, ITIL® provides a set of consistent IT best practices to improve processes for IT and deliver service improvements that are aligned with business needs. Best practice is simple, common sense that leverages other organisations’ successes and failures. The core business driver within IT senior management continues to be the reduction of complexity to drive cost reduction. This objective drives alignment between IT and the business.

There is no “silver bullet” when it comes to estimating efficiency gains IT can achieve when implementing a best practices IT Service Management solution.  Most IT organizations know there is tremendous value in investing in maturing their IT service capabilities based on ITIL® or other industry frameworks.  However, when management requires an up-front quantification exercise, where do you start?  This whitepaper presents real company ROI results based on extensive industry research conducted by IDC.  Process-specific benefits are highlighted – providing you with industry guidance to develop your own soft and hard ROI savings projections.

Since the IT Infrastructure Library’s (ITIL®) update in 2000, the business environment has changed significantly, requiring a less IT centric and more holistic approach to the business of service management. The newest version of ITIL (ITIL V3), takes the form of processes and functions that are managed throughout the lifecycle of the service. This paper describes the underlying principles of the library and how FrontRange Solutions IT Service Management (ITSM) supports those principles.

With economic challenges ahead, IT organisations will likely be taking a hard look at priorities, focusing strictly on areas that allow IT to do more with less and mitigate financial risk.

When the No.1 cause of a service interruption is an unplanned change to the infrastructure, the business relies on IT to introduce change control as part of its overall service management strategy. Click here to read our white paper which will help you address the following challenges:

 - What new processes and tools can reduce the financial risk presented by poorly managed change?

 - What IT projects should be considered to reduce IT spending but still improve performance objectives?

In these three short chapters you will discover how to;

Optimise your Service Desk by automating call delivery, shifting communication to self-service with password resets and utilise 'Tier Zero' support with proactive broadcasting

Optimise your Software Budget by understanding software usage, licence management and software auditing

Optimise Software Management by streamlining software provisioning, controlling break/fix costs and manage software upgrades

Internal IT support is challenged with increasingly complex systems and technology, and the failure rate of critical business systems is climbing. When these systems are frequently down, it is time for IT to focus on Problem Management, rather than just being a break/fix response team. A consolidated Incident and Problem Management solution designed to support ITIL® best practices processes is critical to become a proactive support centre. IT will achieve significant optimisation when system issues are addressed proactively – before the business is impacted. With a successful Problem Management function, underlying infrastructure errors can be eradicated resulting in a dramatic reduction in the number of incidents.

It is no secret that an ITIL-based Change Management process will further optimise IT as it directly contributes to reducing Incident, Problem, and Availability Management support requirements. When IT can readily identify applications and the underlying technology that cause the biggest business impact, IT can expand beyond IT optimisation to deliver significant business optimisation.

An SDI (Service Desk Institute) survey found that IT support staff spends 73% of their day on Incident Management. Incident Management is therefore the first place to look for new efficiencies when it comes to optimising Service Desk value.

When customer call volume is on the rise, the Service Desk must come up with new ways to automate service response to keep up with ever-increasing customer service expectations. Seamlessly integrating Voice and Web support channels into the Service Desk can result in a significant increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty. A company’s customer base is it’s most valuable asset – and serving that customer base in a positive manner can result in a direct bottom line benefit to the company.

In a world of increased competition, organizations increasingly are turning to support as a way to achieve long-term differentiation for their products and services. Customers often see as much or more value in the support that an organization offers as a part of its products and services than in the products and services themselves. Best-in-class support organizations confirm that the optimal way to master support is to achieve success initially from within the organization, and then expand these efforts outward through the distribution channel and ultimately to their customers.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) continues to challenge and befuddle IT shops and risk/
compliance management organizations. The scope of SOX has initially been interpreted more broadly
than intended by the SEC as a result of a lack of clarity on the role of IT in meeting the regulation. IT
has now come to a greater focus and understanding of the specific requirements of SOX but also needs
to consider ways in which SOX compliance can be combined with similar governance policies and
compliance obligations.

Knowledge management used to consist of support analysts recording problems and solutions in three-ring binders with index tabs, yellow Post-it Notes on the perimeter of one’s monitor, and a crude crossindex system that was part paper, part memory, a lot of good luck and “Don” or “Beth” who had spent years learning the systems they supported, but never wrote anything down. Luckily for all us, in just the past decade, knowledge management software has grown in sophistication, utility, power and in practices that define its use in ways that are slowly reshaping the entire support world and how it captures, reuses and delivers solutions to customers. Knowledge management is fast becoming a professional field in its own right and the development of Knowledge-centered Support (KCS) is teaching support centers how to increase problem resolution time periods that were unimaginable, just five years ago.

The real-time enterprise and the ability to have accurate and accessible information from your service desk is a desire expressed by IT managers worldwide. Despite the challenges, realizing this vision has its obvious advantages, operational inconsistencies are eliminated and users gain real-time access to accurate IT information, bottom line, the entire enterprise becomes more responsive and competitive.

Compliance. It is inescapable. Whether or not the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Basel II or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) directly affects your company, these government regulations are driving IT momentum. Even non-regulated private companies are focused on formalising compliance processes and procedures. A recent survey by Foley & Lardner of almost 300 Board of Directors of private companies found 77% were considering adopting some form of SOX governance control or transparency.

In this white paper you will be introduced to business processes and the FrontRange Solutions Business Process software platform, which enables you to create and run business processes. It will also cover IT Best Practices and ITIL and give an overview of the FrontRange IT Service Management Product.