Why The Service Desk Needs A "Customer-Savvy Approach"

Does your problem management practice resemble a disorganised filing cabinet, with a mess of potential problems, mixed in with complicated incident and some service improvement suggestions thrown in for good measure? Don’t worry, you are not alone, and with some good assessment and planning activities, a helping of patience and an analytical mindset you can work your way out of what seems like a dire situation.

Problem management is an ITSM practice that has the potential to pay huge dividends when it is managed properly, you can get a rapid return on investment by concentrating on removing the biggest pain points for the organisation. Learn how to make incremental improvements in your problem management practice that will really make a difference to the value of service management in your organisation.

HDI conducts comprehensive annual research on almost every aspect of the service desk, from hiring, staffing, and salaries to metrics, frameworks, and technologies. This webinar will explore not only the statistics around the service desk, but what they mean in terms of industry trends and changes. How successful has the “do more with less” approach been? Are service desks hiring, or reducing staff? Is the workload shrinking or growing? What are the top metrics being gathered, and what do they mean?

Attendees will learn:

- What do service desks consider “must-have” technologies for supporting customers/users?
- What contact channels are being used by customers to get support and request services?
- What percentage of organizations are hiring for expansion of the service desk?
- Which frameworks and methodologies are being used?
- What are some areas where improvement is needed?


HDI's 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Roy Atkinson is one of the top influencers in the service and support industry. His blogs, presentations, research reports, white papers, keynotes, and webinars have gained him an international reputation. In his role as senior writer/analyst, he acts as HDI's in-house subject matter expert, bringing his years of experience to the community. He holds a master’s certificate in advanced management strategy from Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, and he is a certified HDI Support Center Manager.

Follow him on Twitter @RoyAtkinson

From the impact of automation to the rise of self-service, the service desk is changing as fast as customer expectations.

Join ITSM professionals as they discuss the State of the Service Desk in 2019 - including where it's headed, how to accurately measure performance and where investment should be focused to maximise employee experience.

Panelists include:
Roy Atkinson, Sr. Writer/Analyst | HDI and ICMI | InformaTech
Barclay Rae, Consultant and Author, Service Management, at Barclay Rae Consulting Ltd.

With continued automation of routine tasks, decline of the break fix model, and eradication of technical debt, what will a future service desk look like? Is there a need for service desks at all? In fact there is still continued growth in this areas – both in the vendor market and in the recruitment of service desk people. What is the essence of the work and value delivered that constantly seems to defy the industry predictions?

This session looks at the key elements that make up the human and business side of service desks – and why we will always need them (for some time at least..)

Our industry is experiencing massive change in the shape of the 4th Industrial Revolution. With it come the challenges of new business and engagement models, the exploitation of technology for competitive gain and the ongoing pressure of speed to market. The question is, are service management practices sufficient to support digital enabled businesses?

In this session,Simon and Michelle will explore the role of some of the latest best and enabling practices particularly ITIL 4, DevOps, Agile, SIAM and VeriSM. They will consider the future of service management, and the promises made by the emerging practices within our industry and consider their ability to support this digitised and frenetic environment.

If we didn’t have IT service management, we’d be in a right mess. But how do you identify and articulate the benefits of ITSM in terms that business people understand?

Starting with familiar ITSM notions such as utility and warranty, this talk explores how these relate to tangible business benefits such as more sales, higher prices, and lower costs and risks. Is ITSM just about keeping the lights on, and is it just as difficult to relate ITSM effort to business benefits as it is to say how much the cleaner’s broom contributed to last month‘s sales? This talk lets you decide for yourself.

The launch of ITIL 4 in March 2019 set out to reimagine IT Service Management as we head into 2020.

With some reviews wishing it had been more revolutionary, and some saying the updated framework has paced itself well with the progression in the industry, there has been much debate about its reception and impact.

Join this BrightTALK panel as Service Management experts discuss and debate the key updates and implementations you need to be aware of.

Enterprises have embraced cloud computing to unlock the opportunity offered by digital transformation. The cloud’s flexibility and agility enable enterprises to grow their business without borders and ensure productivity and efficiency.

While enterprise applications continue to migrate to the cloud, the necessary change in the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked. The hub-and-spoke WAN architecture that served the needs of the enterprise when applications were delivered from the datacenter, must evolve to serve the needs of the era of cloud applications. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is the WAN's response to this paradigm shift in application traffic to the cloud.

While SD-WAN has emerged as a key enabler of secure and seamless direct cloud application access with the benefits of transport independence, better security and path selection, it has brought into focus the importance of the transport underlay and the technology investment — both past and future — that an enterprise needs to consider before adopting SD-WAN.

This webinar spotlights two critical success factors for driving mainstream enterprise adoption of SD-WAN:

*Predictable and robust Internet connectivity
*Investment protection (of installed legacy network equipment or in new technology) as the WAN evolves to support applications delivered from the cloud.

Join us at this webinar as we make sense of SD-WAN adoption for your company.

The increased complexity of software and the need to keep up with fast-paced release cycles create new types of risk in the form of Software Exposure.

Join this interactive 1-2-1 discussion where product strategist and industry expert, Moshe Lerner will share insights including;

- Why you should consider software security as non-functional issue?
- What are the key challenges for managing software security in general and in DevOps environments?
- Best of breed vs Best of suite – Which is the right approach?
- The difference between interactive application security testing (IAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST)? Can IAST replace DAST?
- How to manage and reduce application security risk at scale

Moderated by Yotam Gutman, Founder & Community Manager, Cybersecurity Marketing Community

This webinar is brought to you by the Vivit Testing Quality ALM Special Interest Group (SIG).

Join this webinar that will demonstrate how BNP Paribas started and performed evaluation of ALM Octane and is now using the tool to run complete agile testing lifecycles. The testing lifecycle will be presented as a live demo that follows Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) methodology and uses Gherkin notation for defining test suites.

The testing lifecycle starts with definition of requirements and user stories, heavily builds on test automation and advanced reporting, manages and synchronizes defects across tools, and feeds learnings from testing back into the requirements. It uses an integrated development and testing infrastructure including products like Confluence, Jira, Micro Focus ALM, Micro Focus ALM Octane, Jenkins, GIT, Cucumber, IntelliJ, TestCafe, and others.

BNP Paribas’s journey with agile test automation using ALM Octane started in 2017. The webinar presents in a nutshell how evaluation of ALM Octane was approached and conducted. It explains how new methods were introduced with the objective to leverage full tool functionality. The initiative has soon helped to increase testing efficiency and created important business value.

Webinar participants will learn:

• How BNP Paribas has conducted evaluation of ALM Octane
• Why ALM Octane is much more than just a successor of ALM/Quality Center
• How ALM Octane eases flexible management of its entire surrounding tool chain
• Why methodology like BDD shall precede tools, and not vice versa
• How Gherkin establishes a common language for the entire agile development lifecycle that helps integrating business, development, and testing
• How to use ALM Octane for pipeline management, reporting, defect synchronization, import of performance testing and BPT results, integration of in-sprint testing etc.

There are many challenges facing those who work in the ITSM field. It seems the most significant challenge is the constant changes, whether they are within the tools and customers you are supporting, the on-and-off boarding of employees, or the changes in your ITSM solution from upgrades or total replacement. The Micro Focus Adoption Readiness Tool can help you guard against these changes affecting your business.

• How to stop your knowledge leaving the building when the SME’s move on
• How to put together a knowledge repository and maintain your content efficiently
• How to create new content on the fly
• How to make this knowledge available for everyone at the point of need

As Enterprise DevOps adoption hits the mainstream, organizations are looking to streamline and simplify their Development and Testing practices through the use of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). Whilst CI and CD practices can provide significant benefits, such transformations are often led by Development teams, where little thought is given about the impact that the process and technology changes will have upon testing organizations, and the need to fully align all areas of the application delivery pipeline.
In this live webinar, join Micro Focus to understand:
• How development, test and release processes and pipelines can be easily and simply aligned
• How test automation can be a core component of your CD pipeline and why an orchestrated DevOps toolchain is key to successful DevOps transformation

Join BrightTALK's Harriet Jamieson and Launch Product Marketing's Elisabeth Thomas as they review the latest developments in IT Service Management.

From automation to ITIL 4, Harriet and Elisabeth will be covering where ITSM is headed in the coming months.

As a highly technical expert, you have been successful because of your expert skills. People hire and promote you because of your talent and ability to solve hard problems. This is true. It's also not enough.
What no one tells you is that you're only looking at one of the three factors that lead to career success.
In this session, you will:
- Learn the other two factors (and what you should do about them)
- Learn the four levels of thinking needed to be an expert who leads
- Assess where you are in each of the areas
- Identify at least 2 practical things that you can do to improve your influence, get more support for your ideas and projects and gain more respect as a professional.

​We are in confusing times when it comes to adopting ITSM to deliver functional technology services to the business. ITSM seems to be out-dating itself with ever-changing operating models. This can negatively impact strategies to mature IT and the Business together. The role of IT provider over the last three decades of rapid technological advancement hasn’t adapted nearly enough to mature the company.

You may of heard this many times - "IT must focus on aligning to the business and have a primary focus on service integration". Is your ITSM program working to achieve this focus? Most likely you are among the growing population that is failing or missing the target in order to achieve results with ITSM that ensures business quality and maturity. Listen to Beverly Weed-Schertzer as she explains a fresh perspective on ITSM from practical experiences spanning over three decades.

Take back control of your ITSM program!

Much is being said on how ITSM’s ultimate goal is a high customer satisfaction and great employee experience. Historically, ITSM teams have been using specific performance-based metrics that tend to be internally focused. Even though these metrics are important and remain relevant, they do not really give any insight into the customer experience. So to gain actual insight into customer satisfaction, you need to change your metrics. The question becomes: How do I change my metrics in an efficient way?

In this presentation, Nancy shares some insights about why shifting your focus to measuring customer satisfaction is so important and what’s in it for your ITSM team. She discusses various approaches you can take to accomplish these goals and walks you through which metrics to focus on and how to implement this new strategy.

Nancy Van Elsacker Louisnord is the President TOPdesk USA. She’s also a public speaker, a service management expert and a contributor to numerous leading industry publications and the TOPdesk Blog.