There are a number of requirements that need to be considered when evaluating Knowledge Management none more so than an effective integration between the existing support centre software and the knowledge management tool. The question is not, if a support centre should implement Knowledge Management. It is when and how to provide most value to the organisation

 The first and perhaps most difficult of launching a knowledge management program is to put in place a strategy for sharing knowledge. It entails a collective visioning as to how sharing knowledge can enhance organisational performance, and the reaching of a consensus among the senior management of the organisation that the course of action involved in sharing knowledge will in fact be pursued. 

IT must align with the business and deliver strategic value to the company. But what’s your best course of action? The release of IT Infrastructure Library version 3 (ITIL v3) promises to ease business and technology integration with its increased focus on service strategy. Yet meeting business value expectations can be elusive without a pragmatic, customer-focused approach to IT, using a best practices process framework such as ITIL.

Improving business processes was the No. 1 business priority for the fourth consecutive year in Gartner’s worldwide survey of 1,500 Chief Information Officers (CIOs).1 Business process improvement is just one part of an overall focus on strategic contribution that the business is expecting from CIOs. As IT evaluates opportunities to innovate, they will naturally look for solutions that bring together technology silos to deliver strategic differentiation.

Business has never been more reliant on IT than it is today. From acquisition to order processing to customer care, IT is involved in every element of every business. Nevertheless, IT organizations are struggling with the requirements of the business and are looking toward best practices for answers to the challenges they face. Best practice is simple, common sense that leverages other organizations’ 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.

It’s time to take IT service management to the next level. To win customer loyalty by providing truly personalized experiences—and to win in their markets—businesses today are counting on their IT organizations to transform service delivery. IT organizations that master the management of the full life cycle of IT services are able to deliver tangible and tactical benefits. Faster incident response times, better root-cause analysis of problems, fewer change-related complications affecting business services, and improved oversight of servicelevel agreements (SLAs) and catalogs are among those benefits, leading to a more proactive service desk and better service management.

In response to business pressures to increase service quality while reducing costs, many IT organizations are searching for tools to help them move from service desk to service management. This executive briefing series is designed to help you understand the critical building blocks required for an effective IT Service Management (ITSM) application, to ease your transformation to service management.

As your business grows, managing IT services becomes more complex and requires a new approach and new tools. A help desk was the right solution in the early days. Users would call with an issue, and technicians would attempt to fix it as quickly as possible. IT was predominately in a firefighting mode and help desk software had a fairly singular focus: tracking incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another.

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.

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 is fast becoming a professional field in its own right and the development of Knowledge Centred Support is teaching support centres how to resolve more problems in less time. This methodology is allowing organisations to:

- Improve customer satisfaction
- Increase support centre capacity
- Lower turnover rates

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, realising 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.

In a world of increased competition, organisations 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 organisation offers as a part of its products and services than in the products and services themselves. Best-in-class support organisations confirm that the optimal way to master support is to achieve success initially from within the organisation, and then expand these efforts outward through the distribution channel and ultimately to their
customers.

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.

To make ITIL implementation seamless and avoid common ITIL pitfalls, companies can learn from service providers that have acquired concrete experience with their own data centers. In particular, such service provider ITIL best practices can help enterprise IT groups to better manage internal change by focusing on preparation, benefits to affected personnel, and user involvement. To get more value from service providers, CIO’s need to push their partners to develop a more systematic advisory approach calculating ITIL ROI and preparing ITIL business justifications that point to the longer-term benefits of implementation.