IBM Links Service Desks for Rapid Response

Business challenges demand leaner, meaner IT operations

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. In a challenging economic environment, reducing costs is a primary imperative for organizational resilience and business growth. By accomplishing more while using fewer resources, IT organizations can more swiftly and effectively respond to difficult conditions, serve users and customers better and create business value generally—even when the economic outlook is cloudy.

One logical approach to reducing costs lies in optimizing IT operations. As organizations have grown, their IT operations teams have grown in parallel—often developing not in accordance with an overarching, strategic plan, but on an ad-hoc basis, into separate silos which don’t always collaborate ideally for an optimal business outcome.

When technical problems occur under such conditions, they won’t always be detected, reported, diagnosed and resolved in an efficient fashion. Many challenges can instead characterize the organization’s handling of them. For instance, different IT operations teams, using different tools for different purposes, may be uncertain who, exactly, holds ownership of a given problem. Crucial information necessary to solve problems may be available in one context, tool or support domain, but not in another. Generally, such a situation delays the referral of the problem to an appropriate team member, increasing its time-to-resolution and decreasing the productivity of end users experiencing the problem.

This situation represents a common complexity for IT managers to resolve—but it also represents a potential opportunity for cost-savings. When such cross-domain inefficiencies are identified and addressed to spur a faster outcome, IT operations will be both more efficient and more cost-effective. Service levels will climb, and user productivity will climb in proportion—both substantial wins. The business argument for optimizing IT operations, therefore, is an exceptionally strong one, and never more than today, when many organizations seek to reallocate funds from IT operations to IT development, and in that way spur the development of innovative new services designed to pair well with emerging customer demand.

Integrate service desk tools to drive IT efficiency and reduce costs

One powerful example of how IT operations can be optimized to reduce costs, increase service levels and spur productivity lies in the integration of two service desk products: IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager (TSRM) and SAP Solution Manager. Designed for different functions, used by different teams and yet similar in the larger context of IT problem reporting and resolution, they are often both deployed in large, enterprise-class organizations.

And today, thanks to innovative new IBM Tivoli software services, these two offerings can be integrated to yield seamless cross-domain information flow—speeding time-to-resolution of technical problems, and driving down the associated costs.

To understand the value proposition of such a service, one need only consider some of the complexities that may apply when these two service desk solutions are used in parallel by an IT organization.

Incidents (technical problems) will be reported by users through one tool but not the other; this means, of course, that the team associated with the other tool has no awareness of the problem or access to its details. If the incident was reported through the wrong tool, to the wrong team, its ticket and all associated or relevant information must then painstakingly be forwarded to the other team instead.

This is a relatively slow process, which multiplies the time required before the problem has been solved, and along with it, the business impact the problem creates. Every minute that goes by in which an end user can’t access a key service required to perform job functions represents a business cost to the organization.

IT morale will typically fall in this scenario. IT team members are well aware that there is an unwanted duplication of service: problems are reported first by users to IT, then from one IT group to another. Yet neither group has the power to eliminate that duplication.

From the user’s standpoint, things are no better. Technical problems occur; a user is frustrated by them; this frustration is then compounded if the user is unclear about the basic nature of the problem, and therefore isn’t even sure which tool to use in reporting it. Worse, if the wrong tool is used, and the wrong IT group notified, the extra delay involved in solving the problem will exacerbate this user’s experience even more.

IBM links service desks at a logical level—fast

The new IBM service offering, designed to create de facto integration (PDF, 40.5KB) between TSRM and the SAP Solution Manager, addresses all of these problems—quickly, effectively and in a controlled manner that allows the organization to project and control the costs and time required for the integration (and thus, to minimize the business impact it will create).

Following initial consultation and assessment of client needs and infrastructural conditions, IBM specialists essentially connect these two service desks at a logical level—allowing information to flow seamlessly from one tool to the other, in whichever way is required by a specific situation.

For example, imagine that a trouble ticket should actually be fielded by SAP specialists, yet is reported to service desk agents using TSRM. Those TSRM agents can then take direct action within TSRM to forward the ticket to the SAP group. Specifically, they can open a new ticket within SAP Solution Manager and then update its information from the original TSRM ticket with the click of a button. At this point, the ticket will be forwarded to and fielded by the SAP group exactly as if it had been reported that way originally—a dramatically improved workflow. Conversely, if a ticket is reported to the SAP team by mistake, it too can be routed to the TSRM team in the reverse manner, doubling the value of the service to the organization.

This bi-directional information flow represents a clean and relatively simple way to accelerate problem reporting that yields many clear benefits. Average time-to-resolution of all incidents, in both domains, should fall, because delays in crossing domains have been substantially reduced. In turn, thanks to faster resolution of problems, IT service levels and user productivity will both climb. IT operations costs will fall, because fewer resources are required to solve cross-domain problems. And IT team morale and end user morale will both be improved as well. By seamlessly connecting these two service desk tools, the IBM service offering will have transformed IT operations into a single authoritative source of information, rather than a siloed organization characterized by fragmented tools and slowed response times.

Organizations interested in working with IBM to achieve this compelling outcome will be pleased to find the service is supported by proven best practices frameworks such as ITIL V3, to ensure that information flow is carried out optimally from both technological and business perspectives.

While implementations vary depending on different circumstances, the entire integration process, from initial discussion to implementation to testing to final training, should usually require no more than fifteen days.