Three challenges for Service Desks. How to support IT departments, employees and customers?

The workloads of IT Service Management Departments keep increasing. The pandemic and the resultant massive shift to remote work, the progressing digitalization of companies and the widespread use of the cloud are making service desks more and more busy. Simultaneously, users have higher demands and are reluctant to accept longer waiting periods before they can contact a service employee. How to make both parties happy, take some load off the IT teams’ shoulders and improve the satisfaction of people using their services? The solution is provided by cutting-edge ITSM systems based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Such as BMC Helix.

The management of IT services has long been carried out through manually operated processes and tools which require the participation of numerous employees. Members of ITSM teams received service requests in person (via the system, by phone or by e-mail), they assigned statuses and then performed the allocated tasks. However, this mode of operation was time-consuming, costly and ineffective. It failed to stand the test of time in more advanced enterprises with their daily use of cloud technologies, the Internet of Things and innovations following the wave of the digital transformation.

The weak points of ITSM departments operating in a manual mode were especially exposed during the pandemic. Employees massively shifted to the home office mode and started using cloud applications and private devices for work purposes. Service employees had to face the necessity of managing a growing number of servers, services, and tools. In addition, there was a wave of requests regarding the purchase of new hardware or licences and configurations. There was no other choice but to implement new ITSM solutions which would automate the processes and take some load off the teams, explains Krzysztof Andrian, CEO at Concept Data.

Cognitive technologies – systems which learn

Which tools to choose? One should definitely consider systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

We recommend the BMC Helix platform to our customers. BMC has invested in developing tools that will provide enterprises with a new model of service desks, i.e. Cognitive Service Management (CSM), which basically means the management of IT services with the use of such technologies as AI and ML. This model enables the automation of task performance by the system which uses huge amounts of data (including historical data) as the basis for specific operations carried out without any need for human intervention, adds Michał Skowroński, ITSM Team Lead at Concept Data.

The Helix suite changes the way that ITSM departments operate. For long years, employees in these departments responded to service requests or other orders. Users phoned them or wrote e-mails or contacted the service desk via a dedicated portal. The actions taken by IT teams were chiefly reactions. Later on it became possible to predict potential failures by monitoring the infrastructure and detecting errors or irregularities.

The BMC Helix suite is another step in this evolution. On the one hand, the tool enables communication with users through a chatbot, while on the other hand, it automatically converts messages from employees and customers into service requests which are then automatically categorised and assigned to relevant groups and service employees. This significantly reduces the workload of ITSM departments and shortens the time from request to completion.

Artificial intelligence in practice – how CSM supports enterprises

In order to understand who an ITSM system driven by advanced technologies operates and what business benefits it brings, one should take a look at the biggest challenges faced today by both employees and customers of service desks.

1. No visibility

More and more applications, devices and services (also in the cloud) result in a growing number of problems experienced by IT departments which are unable to handle such a complex infrastructure and ensure business continuity. Dispersed systems, services and applications hosted on different servers require thorough familiarity with interconnections between the elements and their mutual dependencies.

BMC Helix Discovery collects, mostly automatically, all the information about the resources that the company holds in its data centre and in the clouds from various providers. The solution detects 40,000 software versions, 3,000 network devices, 25 storage brands, 1,000 types of relations, 100 platforms of intermediary software and 25 DevOps technologies. As a result, it provide visibility into all resources, which is essential for effective management of services in any modern company.

2. The increasing number of requests

Remote work and the growing use of cloud-based solutions mean one thing – an escalation of service requests. Today, service desks have to handle not only maintenance, purchase and repair of hardware and systems, but also data recovery, backups or licence management. They do all of this in a dispersed environment and remotely.

With BMC Helix ITSM, IT teams get one console to see all service management processes within all applications. The system makes it possible to receive information about incidents, i.e. problems reported by users, to manage changes in IT services, to build a knowledge base, to monitor IT services and to manage the base configuration. Helix ITSM automates workloads and it also categorises and assigns requests.

The experience of the manufacturer and huge capabilities of the platform itself have earned BMC the leader status in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report under the category of ITSM tools.

3. Difficult to get in touch

More work and more requests means one thing for employees and customers – it is difficult to get in touch with ITSM departments and you have to wait a long time before you get the chance to speak with a service engineer.

Helix Digital Workplace solves this problem in no time. It is a dedicated portal where end-users can order services and report problems, use the chat function to talk with the support staff as well as get access to the knowledge base, i.e. the information about IT resources managed by the user.

BMC Helix Digital Workplace can be seamlessly integrated with external systems and enables constructing executive processes with the use of data from other applications and bases. In consequence, many of these processes can happen automatically. How does it work in practice? Here is an example which many people encounter on a daily basis. A manager employing a new person and setting up an e-mail account does not have to contact the IT department. Thanks to the integration of Digital Workplace with Microsoft, the manager can create the Office 365 e-mail account directly from the portal and assign the application’s licence to the new employee. That is a great advantage of Digital Workplace from BMC, adds Krzysztof Andrian.

BMC Helix – one package, many possibilities

The new solution from BMC offers many other possibilities to ITSM departments. Importantly, it enables constructing applications that support the work of not only IT teams, but also business and administration departments.

The package is delivered within the SaaS model and owing to containerization it is ready to implement in any IT environment, including hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Companies are free to choose any individual elements of the package or the full solution.

We will gladly tell you more about the possibilities provided by BMC Helix. Please contact us at: info@conceptdata.pl.

Read more about IT services and infrastructure management:

BMC Helix. Effective management of modern IT infrastructure

IT under constant supervision. 5 advantages of BMC Discovery

Shadow IT. A loophole for cybercriminals, a problem for businesses