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How Relevant Is ITIL in Digital Transformation?

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 18:33:30 Z

How Relevant is ITIL in Digital Transformation?

As business and technology merge more into the digital world, technology continues to evolve to produce better products and services for its customers. While organisations continue to undertake digital transformation in order to improve their operations, there’s a question that ITSM professionals get asked often: how relevant is ITIL in digital transformation?

What is ITIL?

ITIL, Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a selection of practices for IT Service Management (ITSM) that strives to bring IT services in line with the needs of the business. ITIL is important for improving the service output of a business.

ITIL, when it started back in the ‘80s, was all about ensuring that IT was providing a service to customers that met the requirements and needs of organisations. It was no longer enough to just offer hardware and software to support the new digital age that organisations were entering. The services and resources had to add value to the business, certainly at a time when IT entailed huge costs.

ITIL has now gone through 4 iterations but this is still very much the premise of ITIL, deriving value by using a set of ‘Guiding Principles’ to ensure customers' needs are continuously being met.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of adopting and adapting digital technologies to create or improve current business practices, culture and customer experiences to meet the latest market demands. The implementation of digital transformation initiatives is seen as the reimagining of business.

How IT serves customers, the business and end users has changed as requirements, demand and technology has evolved.

Organisations want to do things quicker and simpler while looking to reduce costs and waste as much as possible.

So as an ITSM vendor, it’s increasingly important that we can offer solutions that are flexible in deployment and simple in administration whilst providing continuous value as the needs of business change and they look at new ways to do things.

ITIL, Digital Transformation and Remote Working

The events of 2020 have forced a lot of businesses to change, adapt and review their delivery model of IT and other business areas. They’ve needed to examine how such services are provisioned, consumed, supported and maintained.

How can we still provide a service to our customers who are now remote, relying on their own infrastructure at home and far away from physical support and assistance?

The answer comes in two forms. The first is to evaluate current services and offerings. Are they still fit for purpose? Are they still providing the value they were designed to achieve? As organisations embark on continuous adoption of technologies, it is always good to evaluate current services as you could improve these and further leverage new technology investment.

The second is to ensure you have technology that allows the technical aspects of ensuring services are configured and performing while easily accessible for your customers. This is where digital transformation comes in.

However, when introducing digital transformation you need technologies that augment your Service Desk and other IT departments, not replace them.

Ivanti develops digital transformation solutions with this in mind. With Ivanti Service Manager you have the benefit of ITIL 3 certifications across 13 key Service Management Practices, supported by technology inherent in the platform that allows for workflows, automation, and a vast array of reporting capabilities to check and balance how your services and practices are performing.

And with Ivanti Neurons – a hyper-automation platform from cloud to the edge, designed to self-heal, self-secure and self-service – you are adding infinite resources and capabilities to your Service Desk and wider Service Delivery teams that can align directly to your ITIL Practices, thereby ensuring that not only are you providing value to your customers but excelling in expectations.

Ivanti Neurons detects issues before users do, will raise an incident and where desired, can then enter the chain of Service Management events using automation, inherent in Ivanti Service Manager that enables end to end automated Service Management.

Ivanti Neurons will also Self-Heal, remediating issues for end users before they become aware of any issue.

Now is the time many organisations are evaluating their technology stack and validating whether they still meet the needs of an ever evolving digital transformation. Certainly, where ITIL Practices are deployed, focusing on providing business value, the Ivanti Platform is designed to optimise spend and resources, ensuring you can enhance the services that are supporting your customers and your business. Start your digital transformation today with Ivanti Neurons.

Ivanti Cloud: Everyone’s Personal IT Assistant

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 17:20:18 Z

Report, Respond, Remediate. Learn how Ivanti Cloud enhances IT Service Management and how organizations are able to: Reduce Risk, Cost and Exposure whilst Increase Governance, Improve User Satisfaction and Productivity.

Many organisations today are tasked with a new way of supporting both their end users and assets. This is stretching resources and capabilities for many organisations as they adapt to this change.

The office is the traditional hub of connectivity – not just to systems, but also to one another. Interaction and collaboration between employees now require technology at various levels; your laptop, home internet connectivity, collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams as well as other business critical applications.

With many variables that all require remote monitoring and support, this can pose a challenge to traditional IT departments with requirements for multiple technologies and disperse IT teams.

Often reactive to IT issues, finding solutions, testing and implementing, this approach has always been time and resource intensive, not just to IT but to the end users and ultimately the business.

Broadening capacity and the capability to the Service Desk traditionally meant an increase in headcount, additional toolsets, training, sometimes all three. These can come with their own challenges and complexities when trying to maximise these investments, not to mention the financial implications. This is not fool proof of course and there would still be areas to address to ensure productivity, business continuity, security and compliance or resource optimisation.

‘Shift Left’

Escalating incidents to 2nd or 3rd line teams means a delay and increased complexity to resolve.

Not only does an escalation add to an already busy 2^nd or 3^rd line queue but other tools such as inventory or endpoint management tools, and security solutions need to be included into the 2^nd or 3^rd line armoury. Each of these comes with their own associated configurations, installs and individual profiles to manage users and assets.

It has long been a strategic goal to shift left for most (if not all) organisations, reducing the cost of incidents. Take for example a typical service desk incident. An end user is unable to send emails, they’re unable to locate the resolution in self-service, a call is made to the service desk. 1st line remotely controls the device - using operating system tools to analyse the problem. When no resolution can be found an escalation to 2nd line occurs. 2nd line remediates the problem by clearing outlook temporary files and checking connectivity. In this example we now publish this automated resolution to first line or even auto remediate once it’s detected.

A ‘shift-left’ approach, as shown below, is the idea of bringing a resolution much closer to the end user, quickly and efficiently.

Choose Ivanti: “Do a lot more, for a lot less”

A recent poll by SDI and Ivanti found that between 61-70% of incidents are resolved by 1^st line and between 11-20% of incidents are escalated to 2^nd line.

Ivanti Cloud is helping organisations to reduce the time it takes 1^st line to solve incidents and reduce escalations to 2^nd line by enabling 1^st line and preventing issues occurring via Cloud Automation, all embedded within Ivanti Cloud.

With Ivanti Cloud you will always know what to do next:

Resolve issues before they escalate or morph into a growing number of IT tickets.
Eliminate hardware purchases before allocating more budget to something because you cannot locate it.
Understand the security risks present—right now, real time. What devices on your network are unmanaged or unused?

Timely information is always at a premium. Match that with the actions required to get the job done.

Ivanti Cloud has expanded to include ‘Self-Healing’ capabilities. These are automated Bots that continuously monitor more than 60 key areas (and growing).

Here are some examples in these areas where Ivanti Cloud can benefit organisations:

Security and Compliance

Software Enforcement – Are you sure that (corporate) devices are not being overloaded with non-business approved applications that could impact their performance? Are these applications a breach of your software policy, do they violate terms or even contain malware? Automating the identification and removal of ‘Blacklisted’ applications helps ensure security and compliance.

Resource Optimisation

Whether this is virtual machines or licensable software that is not being used, it is possible to automate their removal or provide alerts to the right teams to remediate.

Monitor logon performance for end users or servers, identify why, remediate, automatically raise an incident.

User Productivity

Does a user have a laptop that has a near full or failing hard disk? This is something a lot of end users are unlikely to be aware of until it’s too late and for a failing drive, could be severely impacting. Ivanti will alert IT by raising an incident with all the necessary details to address the issue before it becomes a problem.

Business Continuity

Identify key and critical business solutions such as CRM tools, internal applications or any SaaS application. Ivanti will continuously monitor defined websites for latency and reachability to make you aware should they fall below defined thresholds.

What about my ITSM solution?

Ivanti is truly making proactive IT the new norm by identifying problems before the end user is aware and becomes impacting while at the same time offering a remedy and implementing a solution.

Ivanti Cloud connects to Ivanti Service Manager and other ITSM solutions to ensure all issues and resolutions are logged throughout, ensuring no identified issue, resolution or change occurs without a ticket being logged with the resolution, too!

Ivanti Cloud makes it possible to identify and resolve issues remotely without user interaction, the end user may not even be aware of a remedy being applied to an issue before it becomes impacting.

Ivanti Cloud “shift left” approach is proactively working to avoid users having to raise tickets and incidents with the Service Desk. Coupled with widespread remote working, users can no longer wonder across to IT for a remedy which leaves them potentially out of action and having to wait to receive a new device in the most extreme case.

And to the Datacentre…

Ivanti Cloud has ‘Patch Intelligence’, allowing detailed analysis of patching requirements:

Real Time metrics that create impacting visuals in a number of areas that help ensure continuity and provide insight into security areas; real time status of SSL certificates, and an overview of your ‘Security Health’, for example.

Ivanti Cloud is the ‘Always on IT’ giving the insight, the visibility and the remedy that can be applied automatically. Providing business continuity whilst also increasing security and governance within the datacentre and maintaining user productivity all in one, securely hosted solution that supports multiple Operating Systems with remote control abilities and with zero infrastructure requirements.

Request, Resolve; Anytime, Anywhere

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 23:23:12 Z

Remote working, working from home or working anywhere that isn’t the office can be considered a benefit that allows for great flexibility in today’s modern society.

Aside for some obvious pitfalls that can occur with remote working (children, pets, deliveries, etc), one thing that has certainly made it entirely possible is ‘Cloud’.

For some time now, ‘Digital Transformation’ has been a well-used marketing buzz term. What we can’t deny is we are now truly living out the benefits of Digital Transformation and that continues to evolve as technology continues to develop. Cloud has contributed a significant shift in the way that organisations are run. It has enabled them to be more agile, collaborative and resilient.

One additional area is ‘Continuity and Resilience’ and Cloud as part of the Digital Transformation has made this possible and much easier for most organisations.

This is a true example now of realising Digital Transformation. In a recent published Ivanti blog, I discussed the benefits of organisations having an efficient Self Service with workflows and automation that are able to turn business processes into effective outputs, quickly.

This creates the ideal interface for the core areas of the business to request IT, HR, Facilities and other business support units; furthermore, such transformation has made the working from home experience no different to working in the office.

Changing Business and Market Requirements

At Ivanti, we take feedback from our customers to focus our efforts in the most highly requested areas.

A ‘must have’ from customers in the past couple of years was a requirement for mobile access to Ivanti Service Manager. When we start to look at some of the research from broadbandsearch.net, it is hardly surprising:

At the start of 2009, internet usage was nearly 100% desktop based.
By October 2016, mobile internet usage overtook the desktop (51.3% vs 48.7%).
In 2020, multiple studies suggest this is now as high as 80%.

The research also suggests that as this trend continues, mobile and tablet devices will be the new norm possibly even making the traditional laptop obsolete.

With the use of mobile devices and tablets, 90% of the time is spent using apps. The reason for this is that engagement is up to four times better in apps than mobile web browsers. Users expect a more seamless and slicker experience within an app vs the mobile website equivalent.

This is why Ivanti Service Manager has a dedicated app that allows for access to things like Self Service, Knowledge Base and to Request Support.

‘Analyst on the Go’

Some examples might include;

Desk visits – needing to make notes on an incident, access knowledge articles or history of a ticket whilst away from the desk, search for related Problem tickets.

Server room activities – raise, update, close tickets on the fly.

Remote work/on call at weekends – managing queues, escalations, updates.

On the flip side, you have a vast end user community who will want to easily raise support issues, submit new requests, track existing requests or simply look for knowledge articles. The benefits of being able to do this on your mobile means that your end users are not limited to their laptops or desktops. It also encourages the use of Self Service and reduces email and telephone communications.Self Service is often viewed as a key component to speed up resolution, increase Self Help through the Knowledge Base, this will vastly improve end user productivity and IT efficiencies.

According to the SDI Bench Marking Reporting 2019, 45% of incidents were raised by Telephone and 33% by email. Self Service Incidents was still relatively low at 23%.

An existing Ivanti Service Manager Customer, Aggreko, found that the use of the new self-service portal is increasing rapidly—up from 0.8% to 10% in the first quarter alone since implementation.

Ivanti Service Manager Mobile App allows easy access via a simple interface on an end users mobile device, more conveniently at times when booting up a laptop might not be possible or convenient. It also allows your IT workforce to have the power of Ivanti Service Manager in their hands.

Make 2020 the Year to Help Your Self-Service

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 15:00:00 Z

When smart phones started to become a real thing back around 2007, they received a number of criticisms that were mainly borne from not realising the revolutionary way we’d start to consume technology. Nobody realised how we’d end up using such tech and how it would be universally adopted and eventually become the new norm.

The old adage “we’ve always done it this way” springs to mind. Touchscreen wasn’t particularly new but wasn’t really liked as much as old fashioned buttons. You’d be a brave person to try and pry away an old-fashioned style of phone that had physical buttons from a corporate executive and try to offer them a touchscreen equivalent.

So iconic are the first touchscreen smart phones now that they fetch many thousands of dollars in the second-hand market as we can now appreciate how they changed the way we consume technology.

Whether we agree with it or not, children are now able to pick up a tablet or phone and work their way through the latest episodes of a well-known loveable pig, and that’s before they’ve even learnt to say their first words.

Here is where the value lies: with zero training and no prior knowledge, this is a platform that allows an organisation’s end user to obtain and request an ever increasing number of services that they need on a daily basis in order to perform their jobs successfully.

Frictionless IT

This is not a new term, but what does it really mean? Forbes describe it as “…friction appears as fragmented customer profiles, departmental silos, inefficient workflows, shadow IT, slow feature deployment, a disparate martech stack, redundant processes and anything else that gets in the way of or slows customer and user experience.”

Ultimately businesses need their employees to have at hand all the resources they need to be effective and productive whilst the business maintains control, security and cost.

Ivanti Service Manager breaks down these silos by offering an Enterprise Service Management platform, allowing end users to request a wider variety of services, quickly and easily.

Whether you want to request an application, onboard a new hire, or a simple break\fix “I need assistance” request, it has never been easier to Self Service your own requirements.

Enterprise Service Management is a significant investment for organisations that makes the adoption and usage vital. Ivanti Service Manager scored highest in the Gartner critical capabilities; two key areas assessed were the “User Experience and Flexibility” and “Self-Service/Request Fulfilment”. This reinforces the principle of how important that user centric IT has now become.

Out of the box, Ivanti Service Manager comes with 80 service request offerings, covering IT, HR and Facilities.

When it comes to IT Service Management, Ivanti Service manager is Pink Verified for 13 ITIL practices.

Allow Ivanti to take care of the legwork background, with automation following the business rules and logic that determines how each request needs to be handled and ultimately fulfilled.

These are the workflows (120 out of the box) that remove inefficiencies and will now provide the backbone to the success of effective inter-departmental process, whilst importantly delivering exactly what end users requested in a timely manner.

Finally, we can now offer organisations a pick and choose menu of services for their end users that is just as easy to consume as it is for a toddler to pick and choose hours of cartoons on a tablet before he or she has even learnt to read. Or perhaps better still, be guided to more educational activity-based games.

So just like children with tablets, your organisation can gain instant value by enabling end users to request access to the things they need to get the job done—“Help-Your-Self-Service”.