Panel: How IT Leaders in Education are Preparing for Numerous Possibilities

By now you’ve heard that IT asset management (ITAM) can save your organization time and money. If only it were that easy!

Technology environments are complex, and remote work has become a standard practice, which means that identifying and managing IT assets is more difficult than ever before.

In this presentation, SolarWinds Solutions Engineers Jason Yeary (ITIL 4®) and Sean Sebring (ITIL 4®) will simplify your approach with a list of steps every IT team can take to elevate their ITAM strategy. We’ll cover:

- Identifying the “what, where, and how many” for all IT assets
- Managing asset lifecycle with contract, warranty, and relationship data
- Reducing costs with actionable asset records
- Combining ITAM and ITSM to elevate IT services and support

Who Should Attend:

- IT leaders
- Help desk managers
- IT asset managers
- Help desk technicians

Is your IT department shouldering the weight of heightened demand for supporting employees’ technology needs? Yeah, we thought so. Understandably, this has led many organizations to rethink (or entirely reimagine) their ITSM strategy.

What are the greatest challenges currently in support and service delivery? How can IT teams lead the charge in addressing these challenges?

Join two ITIL 4® certified experts from SolarWinds as Tim Lawes (manager, solutions engineering) and Sarah Nielsen (manager, onboarding) discuss six primary areas for improvement that their teams see from IT leaders, including:

- Streamlining basic ticketing, moving away from email requests
- Creating a quality service portal to centralize resources
- Building a comprehensive repository of IT assets

Who Should Attend:
- IT leaders
- Help desk managers
- Help desk technicians

Service desk technicians often receive incidents related to IT infrastructure, such as network connectivity or login failures. In many cases of network or application performance issues, monitoring software has already issued an alert on the IT operations side, which should offer the service desk a head start on workarounds and resolutions.

Join SolarWinds Head Geeks™ Liz Beavers (ITIL® 4) and Chrystal Taylor, as they cover some of the ways to increase visibility across IT and improve the service experience, including:

- Opportunities for IT operations and IT service management to share information
- What types of monitoring alerts should automatically generate service desk tickets
- How the service desk can help resolve infrastructure issues more quickly, reducing impact on the entire organization

Who Should Attend:

- IT leaders
- IT operations professionals
- Help desk managers
- Help desk technicians

IT service management (ITSM) has morphed over the years, thanks in large part to technology and the environment. Even as ITSM practices and channels evolve, a core component that remains constant is identifying the relationships across your infrastructure and understanding the implications that updates or changes will bring. While workforces transition and strengthen their remote operations, it’s more important than ever to keep business applications and services running smoothly in order to maintain cultural values and positive user experiences.

Join Liz Beavers, Head GeekTM at SolarWinds, as she showcases the value behind Configuration, Change and Release Management and the benefits your organization can reap by implementing these practices. Liz will dive into considerations for establishing configuration records and relationships, as it aligns with business goals, as well as how your Configuration Management Database can uncover trends to support data driven decisions for changes and releases. Over the course of this session, we’ll explore weaving technology and automation into these ITSM strategies to enhance visibility, improve communications, and streamline operations.

About the speaker:
Like many IT professionals, Liz’s entry into the tech industry was unconventional. With plans to pursue a career in public relations, Liz’s career quickly took a turn toward technology. She got her start working as a customer success manager with a research platform for the financial industry prior to joining Samanage, now SolarWinds Service Desk.

Prior to becoming a SolarWinds Head GeekTM, Liz served as the technical point of contact for SolarWinds Service Desk customers. In this role, she combined the best of both worlds: her passion for communicating with prospective and existing customers while leaning on her multiple ITIL certifications to provide ITSM best practices to help alleviate pain points, work smarter, and streamline service desk operations.

Automation and AI in ITSM have come a long way. The improvements they’ve made to parts of ITSM - including to workflows, change management, pushing updates and ticketing - have had a significant impact on customer and employee experience and satisfaction.

So what’s next for AI, machine learning and automation in ITSM? And how is it changing employee service management? Join this expert panel as they share insights, advice and use cases about areas of ITSM that are being revolutionized by intelligent technologies, including:

- Improved IT operational efficiencies
- Increased cost savings
- Faster incident and problem resolution
- Better release management
- Higher customer/end-user satisfaction

As plans begin to formalize for the classroom in 2020, IT leaders in education must prepare for fluid possibilities, ranging from all students at home to all students in the classroom, and everything in between. In many cases, a return to “normalcy” remains unlikely, which means technology will play a critical role for schools and universities.

Join this panel discussion as Jon Hauser (IT Director, University of Washington School of Social Work) and Elaine Low (Technology Support Specialist at Rankin County School District) discuss preparations that universities and K-12 schools are making for the fall, including:

- How to apply lessons learned from the shift to virtual classrooms in the spring
- Possible remote learning structures and how IT can support
- Changes and new technology tools that can solve challenges
- How the IT service desk has adapted to changing needs

An effective ITSM solution should include a positive user experience and powerful technology. In this webcast, explore a cloud-based ITSM solution that covers both to drive effective service: SolarWinds Service Desk.

Join SolarWinds Head Geek™ Liz Beavers for a 30-minute tour of what’s new with SolarWinds Service Desk, including:

- A user-friendly service portal and modern employee engagement channels
- Streamlined ITIL practices for incident, problem, change, and configuration management
- AI-powered suggestions and automated workflows to help technicians work efficiently

Changing IT platforms can be stressful, especially an ITSM solution that the entire organization uses. For the Town of Gilbert, Arizona, the stakes were raised by a sudden need to support an entire remote workforce during a pandemic.

Join this webcast to hear from Jason Thompson, IT Desktop Manager, on his team’s priorities for go-live and how they launched a successful service portal to support employees through unusual circumstances. He’ll cover:

- An implementation checklist
- Adoption of the solution throughout the organization
- How to score quick wins with Service Desk configuration

If you’ve been around IT service management (ITSM) long enough, you’ve likely heard the term enterprise service management—the idea of expanding IT service practices to other departments. We like to call it “employee service management" since you’re consolidating services and resources for the employees in your organization.

The question for many IT leaders is how to communicate the value of these processes and tools to overcome the ingrained communication styles of other departments. Join our panel to score some quick wins and easy conversations in your organization, including:

- Cross-departmental workflows that produce tangible results
- Using a knowledge base and FAQ to provide versatile resources to employees
- Eliminating shared email inboxes by documenting tickets for all departments

IT change management, done well, can help IT maintain business continuity. Done poorly, it can be layered and complex, leading to downtime and widespread disruption. Classifying types of changes, building change records from scratch, and constantly chasing approvals are common bottlenecks in change management processes—all hurdles that ITIL 4 attempts to address.

Join Tim Lawes, solutions engineering manager with SolarWinds ITSM, to learn some practical tips for identifying types of changes, templatizing change requests and record creation, and automating change workflows proactively.

What you’ll learn:
-How to avoid disruptions caused by poorly planned or inconsistent change processes
-Cutting out manual steps of workflows and approval processes
-Collecting necessary data to evaluate risk quickly
-Connecting key stakeholders, including CAB members, to pertinent information with every change record

Complex, evolving IT infrastructure makes it more challenging to deliver IT services. IT departments need a way to understand the relationships within the technology environment, especially in ITSM. This improves their ability to resolve incidents, troubleshoot problems, and execute changes.

In this webcast, we’ll cover some easy ways to build a CMDB, map dependencies, and use that data to improve incident, problem, and change management practices. Join Jason Yeary, solutions engineer with SolarWinds ITSM, as he covers:

- What an effective CMDB includes and how to build it
- How to apply CI records and relationships to service delivery
- The value of visually mapping technology dependencies

Picture this, the IT support pro sitting at a desk, answering phone calls from tech-impaired end users. It feels like a different generation, right? The service desk has evolved greatly over the past decade, and even the past month... and so have those “helpless” employees. Powerful service management platforms, ITIL best practices, and smart technology like AI and automation, have given IT departments the ability to deliver a different experience—and the employees expect it.

Join Sarah Nielsen, onboarding manager for SolarWinds ITSM, as she discusses the ways the service desk can (and must) elevate the experience it delivers to employees, including:

● How to provide versatile engagement methods like mobile and live chat
● Offering self-service, and leading employees to it
● Leveraging data and technology on the backend to make services more proactive

Service level management can be a valuable component of your service desk, but too often, overly-complex or granular SLAs become unmanageable. This can lead to ignored breaches, unhappy customers, and flimsy performance reporting.

Join Melody Scheidler, Senior Solutions Engineer with SolarWinds ITSM, as she outlines best practices for building effective SLAs, including:


- How to audit your current SLAs for common mistakes
- Starting with simple rules that are easy to track
- Automating thoughtful actions around breaches and potential breaches
- How to interpret reporting on SLAs

As the COVID-19 virus rearranged business operations throughout the world, many IT departments accepted the challenge to keep the workforce productive outside of the office. The service desk, in many cases, is on the front lines as employees need access to software, applications, network connections, and equipment at home.

How are IT departments, and specifically service desk administrators, responding to daily challenges? Join our panel discussion, featuring three IT leaders finding success in “work from home” environments.

Azunna Anyanwu, IT Director, Aronson LLC
Jason Thompson, Desktop Support Manager, Town of Gilbert, Arizona
Chris Sanchez, Senior Manager of End User Support, Zoro

Too often, we focus only on the technology and certifications of service desk team members. However, IT is responsible for customer service for all of the employees within your organizations. Ranging from face-to-face, to phone calls, to chat messages, help desk pros are interacting with potentially frustrated employees experiencing disruptions to their workday. While hiring managers should look for a well-rounded technical skill set, help desk pros should strive to develop the extra skills beyond the technical requirements.

Join Matt Cox, senior director of technical services at SolarWinds ITSM, as he discusses the soft skills he looks for in building a tech support team, including:

- How to identify these skills in candidates of diverse backgrounds
- How IT employees can develop the necessary soft skills to advance
- Why the IT service desk requires more than just technical competence

It’s no secret that today’s employees rely on mobile devices to do their jobs. In fact, 87% of companies* ask employees to perform tasks for work from their personal smartphones. Isn’t it time for IT to support employees through those same mobile devices? Today’s employees are conditioned by consumer products to seek self-service, mobile support, and live chat.

Join Jason Yeary, ITIL® 4 certified solutions engineer at SolarWinds ITSM, as he demonstrates the ways ITSM can meet today’s employees where they work, including:

- The SolarWinds Service Desk requester mobile app
- Visibility into tickets from any device
- Live chat with agents

For ITSM professionals, it’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day. There are incidents to resolve, fires to put out, and technology issues that might grind productivity to a halt. Sometimes it’s important to step back to look at the foundation in place to make service delivery easier and more effective overall.

Join Liz Beavers, ITIL® 4 certified solutions engineer, and Sarah Nielsen, implementation manager for SolarWinds ITSM, as they discuss key factors in evaluating your service management strategy. This interactive presentation will cover:

- How to set goals for service delivery
- Implementation and configuration necessities
- Putting user data, asset data, and ticket data to work in your service desk
- Automating service delivery where it makes sense

Employees have pop-up technology needs, and they depend on IT for help. The way IT responds is the way they practice incident management—a primary responsibility for any IT department. Given the amount of time most teams spend on incidents, it’s a valuable ITIL practice to master.

Join Melody Scheidler, ITIL® 4 certified Senior Solutions Engineer at SolarWinds ITSM, to learn tangible ways to manage and resolve incidents more efficiently, including:

- Configuring incident categories and subcategories to drive automation
- Differentiating between incidents and service requests
- Creating service level agreements (SLAs) to drive accountability
- Leveraging an AI-powered knowledge base to promote self-service

According to IBM, 98% of companies plan to use hybrid cloud computing by 2021*. Hybrid IT is already a reality in most organizations. So, what does it mean?

The typical IT shop includes a combination of tools and applications that reside on-premise, in the public cloud, and in the private cloud. The environment might look different month-to-month as certain technologies transition to the cloud. Hybrid IT creates enormous business potential but also brings a dynamic set of challenges—particularly in service delivery.

Join Udi Gotlieb, VP of Product Marketing at SolarWinds, to learn how IT service management (ITSM) can support the ever-changing hybrid IT environment and the challenges it brings, including:

-Managing and consolidating workflows between systems
-Maximizing service delivery from complex technology infrastructure
-Where and how to integrate ITSM and IT Operations

*IBM report, “Assembling your cloud orchestra,” October 2019


Who Should Attend:

-CIOs
-IT Leaders
-Service Desk Managers
-Network and Systems Administrators