Changing Business Service Desk Requirements: How to be Customer-Centric

Many people in IT have been in a technology environment their entire careers, and have never seen the inside of a manufacturing facility, distribution warehouse, or inventory stockroom. This session will cover basic strategies and techniques for achieving significant savings and control in managing IT assets, leveraging best practices from our less-technical counterparts on the business operations side of the house.

Concepts covered include:
• The “ABC” concept of Inventory / Asset Management
• Business best practices applied to IT Asset Management policies for Planning, Identification, Control, Status Accounting and Verification of Assets.

Dwight Stewart is a Managing Consultant in the IT Strategy and Design practice at IBM with over 30 years of IT experience. He is an ITIL v3 Expert, and has delivered numerous Configuration Management and Asset Management process assessments, design, and implementation engagements.

If you’re an IT administrator, you have to manage an ever growing IT estate without enough IT staff. To respond in a timely manner and effectively manage this growing environment, you need comprehensive IT asset management software and hardware inventories of servers, workstations, mobile devices and applications on the network.

This task increases in difficulty as the network expands beyond the walls of your organisation to multiple remote locations. This environment is virtually impossible to administer without IT asset management and reporting automation.

Join this webinar and gain insight on how an effective IT asset management solution can help save your organisation time, money and headaches. Learn more about how you can:

- View and manage the network efficiently from anywhere at any time
- Gain access to any computer server and troubleshoot any issue from your office
- Know at any time, exactly what software is running on the system, when the system was installed, when the license expires, its OS version, the latest security update installed, how much memory or capacity it had and so forth… down to the smallest detail

Chris Brightwell is Senior Engineer at Kaseya and has more than 14 years of IT experience. He has previously worked for Symantec and 2e2.

A lot has changed in the way we communicate for business. A decade ago, most organizations had employees who came to the office every day, used desktop computers and desk phones, and stopped communicating for work when they went home.

Today, people communicate for work anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Per Forrester, sixty-six percent of employees use two or more mobile devices for work. And according to Frost & Sullivan, nearly 25 percent of employees work from home or the road. What’s more, the desk phone is not the only business device. Based on a RingCentral survey, 35 percent of employees are using their mobile phones for work even when they are in the office. And nearly 80 percent of employees text for business, with 32 percent reporting that they’ve even closed a business deal via text.

Even with these undeniable business behavior changes, the vast majority of companies haven’t optimized their communications infrastructure for mobile workforces or BYOD.

Join this webinar to get ahead of the pack and learn the benefits of a cloud communications solution that supports the new world of work.

•Understand the trends driving mobility and behavior changes in the work place, with Melanie Turek, VP of Research for Enterprise Communication & Collaboration, Frost & Sullivan.
•Get the real story from a business that has addressed their mobility needs first hand from Adam Fishman, director of growth and operations for Lyft, a community ride-sharing service.
•Hear how a cloud communications solution is addressing several challenges businesses face in the new work world from Nisha Ahluwalia, VP of product marketing at RingCentral.

Beverly Weed-Schertzer is an ITSM professional with 20 years experience in the industry. Her focus is business improvement specializing in areas of IT Service Management, Support Services, Infrastructure Management, and implementing Best Practice methodologies (ITIL, ISO, CoBIT)

Join Beverly in this webinar as she covers:

- How to assess and prepare infrastructure changes in a last-ditch effort to make sure things don’t get messed up, limits strategic business value; A more mature “middle ground” process approach is a better way to move upstream to improve what's flowing downward stream
- Learn how to mold and unite the Change, Release & Configuration processes as a whole
- How to be mature about Change, Release & Configuration Management

Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) is arguably the most difficult process to successfully implement. The presentation will cover in some detail the theory, its translation and the practice of implementing SACM as two separate processes (ITAM and Configuration Management).

Jalasoft is a fast-growing software development and IT education company. Because of their rapid growth, Jalasoft faced a fast-growing IT environment but had IT budgets that were not keeping pace. As a result, their ability to manage their increasingly complex environment with existing tools, processes, and resources presented a real challenge to their business. Sound familiar? Jalasoft turned to innovative SaaS provider ITinvolve and the power of social knowledge collaboration to help them harness the collective knowledge of their organization so they could support company growth without scaling IT resources to match. With ITinvolve, they gained much better visibility into their IT environment and have reduced failed changes by 70% and can now get new employees fully productive in half the time!

Attend this webinar to learn more about Jalasoft's experiences and the other tangible benefits they have received by using ITinvolve.

It's no secret that configuration management and a CMDB are difficult to implement. But a good CMDB has the potential to become the heart of an IT organization, making value visible through a network of relationships.

Join ITSM Specialist and CMDB practitioner Mark Kawasaki as he outlines a simple plan for implementing a CMDB, while avoiding the most common mistakes that cause organizations to fail. He will also discuss the heart of the matter: how to get the real Value on Investment (VOI), by using the CMDB to connect IT to Business Value in real ways every day. Mark will share real-world examples from Emory University's approach to Configuration Management, how they modeled and implemented a CMDB, and how they brought the IT community together to make it work.

The practice of implementing “Service Transition” processes such as Change, Release & Configuration Management poses many questions to those trying to make it all work together. One of the main questions confronted by many is “How can I get these all to work together?”

As part of this discussion we will try to provide clarity and address some of the daunting questions faced by many, as well as take a look at how Best Practice Automation can help you achieve a higher level of infrastructure control resulting in improved service quality and at a lower cost.

Learn how a state-of-the-art IT automation software helps you unify the handling of a multi-site IT estate configuration and change management, including hardware and software assets, by automating service desk processes, life cycle management and compliance policies and improving service availability.

With the support of an IT automation software, you have more time and resources to focus on strategic decision-making for your IT environment.
 
This webinar will help you understand how to deploy a streamlined, end-to-end configuration, change and release management plan, advise you on how to enforce process controls and how best to integrate technology and process.
 
Register for this webinar and learn about:
 
· Best practices for identifying, assessing/approving, implementing, testing/releasing IT assets, processes and software

· The processes and goals of IT Asset Management and Life Cycle Management

· Reducing risk in operational and application changes

· Improving time to market and reducing risk from uncontrolled changes

· Uncovering savings through process improvement and support for strategic decision-making

· Designing reports and release audits to ensure highest efficiency

· Improving stakeholder collaboration for quicker changes and higher success rate

Is your organization trying to contain costs as Big Data and other initiatives increase the demand for more storage? As the volumes of data continue to increase, so does the need for organizations to cost-effectively manage all their storage assets. In this webinar we will cover multiple options for managing storage. You will learn about discovery of storage assets across SAN, NAS, and multi-vendor platforms. We will discuss practical ways to use trending analysis, forecasting and optimization to cost-effectively address current and future growth requirements. Our discussion will also include an explanation of how integration with other solutions can lead to greater efficiencies through runbook automation as well as incident and configuration management.

Nick has 22 years of enterprise storage experience. He has worked with many global enterprises and has years of direct experience helping organizations evaluate and deploy storage systems and management software. Prior to working as a consultant, Nick was an operations software specialist for HP Global Accounts.

Getting good, solid processes and procedures in place for ITIL’s Change & Configuration Management processes is critical to serve as a quality foundation to develop from. IT organizations increasingly have a need to evolve beyond traditional Change Management and into a hybrid model where discovery and understanding dependencies is a central to the Change Management process. It is this linkage between Change and Configuration Management that has advanced the relationship into more complementary model.

In this session we will discuss how companies are moving beyond traditional connections between the service desk and CMDB to develop a consumer/provider model for their data and processes. We will look at how IT Service Management is getting smarter by leveraging the dependency and mapping data from the CMDB. Spreadsheets and home grown tools or integrations are increasingly a thing of the past.

ITIL describes good practice processes, methods, and techniques for release management. However, these are largely based on how we used to deliver software. Agile development methods, including concepts such as continuous delivery, and the supporting concepts of DevOps, can seem at odds with ITIL good practice. This session will show you how ITIL Release and Change management can be effectively adapted and applied to support Agile and Devops, so that you get the best from both.

This session will focus on the challenges of managing assets and configuration information in a Storage Area Network (SAN). A software solution that identifies the components and paths from servers to storage arrays via SAN switches will be discussed, including how this information can be exported to a CMDB. Change and configuration records for SAN environments will also be presented as well as new provisioning solutions for cloud based environments which require a service level based approach.

Ian has over thirty four years experience in the IT industry with skills in engineering, development, people management, project management, service delivery, service management consultancy and sales. Within IBM Ian has worked as a Technical Sales and Business Consultant in the IBM Tivoli brand across Europe for the last twelve years, specialising in storage software. Ian is an IBM Certified Professional and a qualified ITIL Manager.

Coming up

Today everyone knows about the Cloud. Not just the IT folks – EVERYONE. Most IT customers have personally subscribed to Cloud based services and we continue to see a trend towards consumerization and BYOD.

• Are these online cloud services compatible with how we work in IT Service Management today?
• Some say our best practice frameworks, like ITIL, hardly acknowledge the Cloud. So how can ITSM work in the Cloud?
• Does it have to change? Why should ITIL be any less useful in a Cloudy world?
• Can your business accept that key services – and data – are being hosted somewhere else, and you don’t always know where? Or who is accountable?
• How do we come to terms with the Cloud – and its service providers marketing directly to Business Customers and Users?

This webinar aims to answer these questions and provide reassurances that the Cloud is “manageable” with the right perspective.

Many companies are exploring how to consolidate data centers and applications and adopt Cloud-based solutions as a way to cut costs and decrease complexity. Automation provides unprecedented speed and agility forcing the need to reevaluate the traditional approaches to ITIL and service operation.

Three Key Take Aways:
1. See how cloud automation changes traditional ITIL processes and IT Operations
2. Understand how to enable IT Operations to continue to manage their services in the cloud
3. Learn to use “value-added services” to entice Service Owners to embrace your cloud offering and federate the burden of support

The challenges of virtualized environments are driving the shift to greater integration of service management capabilities such as image and patch management, high-scale provisioning, monitoring, storage and security. In this session, learn how organizations can realize the full benefits of virtualization to reduce management costs, decrease deployment time, increase visibility into performance and maximize utilization.

IBM is helping companies around the world leverage the cost savings of virtualization and increase adoption of cloud with benefits including:

• Visibility into the health and performance of physical and virtual environments
• Visibility into the costs of physical, virtualized and cloud resources
• Mitigating backup and recovery risks due to exponential data growth
• Preventing VM compliance security risks

Cloud computing has emerged as a dominant paradigm, widely adopted by enterprises today. Together with the rapid development of Cloud Computing, several related technological areas have also proliferated into a mega-scale web of complex enterprise challenges such as those arising from Big Data, Mobile Computing, Internet Governance, IT Security and the Internet of Things.

This means that enterprises now have a lot to manage and are often clueless about how enterprise resources should be managed to gain the maximum benefits and lower negative risks. To make the situation worse, many a times, many enterprises are finding themselves wasting resources on areas that do not really matter after all.

As they do not know what they do not know, enterprises are often clueless about where to begin 'to hit the right nails'; they are all searching for more effective, precise and actionable ways to tread this new ‘technological jungle’ efficiently and effectively. Specifically, enterprises are asking how a more flexible IT environment we now have can effectively improve business agility. In this seminar, Wee Wah will shed some clues on what matters most to align IT’s new found flexibility with business agility and how they could be done with strategic service management.