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OV A

Optimizi ng ITIL with SRM S e r v i c e R e s o l u t i

o n M a n a g e m e n t f o r t h e N e x t G e n e r a t

i o n S e r v i c e D e s k Mark Angel Chief Technology Officer, Knova Software, Inc.

Contents The Need for ITIL and the Service Desk..........................................................3 Learning From External Customer Support..............................................................4 What's Missing.........................................................................................................5 Service Resolution Management Fills the Gap..........................................................5

Optimizing the ITIL Framework.......................................................................6 Optimizing Incident Management............................................................................6 Optimizing Availability Management.......................................................................7 Optimizing Service Management.............................................................................7 Optimizing Problem Management...........................................................................8

Conclusions ......................................................................................................8 About the Author.............................................................................................8 About Knova Software....................................................................................8

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The Need for ITIL and the Service Desk IT organizations—and service desks in particular— are under unprecedented pressure. • 47% of IT spending falls in the category of total

cost of support and maintenance (TCSM). With half of IT funding devoted simply to keeping existing systems working, there are fewer resources available to build new capabilities.

• CIOs face an "uptime gap," caught between the

end-user demands for 100% uptime for the everincreasing set of business critical applications, and the best effort service level agreements provided by vendors.

• Outsourcing is a constant threat and puts further

downward pressure on costs.

service management, application management, technology infrastructure management, and security management, IT organizations can bridge the gap between their customers' business requirements and the technology resources they control. The existence of a common vocabulary built around discrete processes provides a starting point for delivering business value cost effectively. Enterprises that have implemented ITIL have achieved significant benefits including: • Continuous improvement enabled through

clearly defined processes and measures

• Reduced cost, improved return on investment

and reduced total cost of ownership through standardization and more effective controls

The Harvard Business Review published the • Reduced risk by adopting of proven controversial piece "IT Doesn't Matter," arguing that practices IT is no longer a source of competitive differentiation, but must simply manage down cost • Auditability built into all practices and risk. Yet IT professionals know they're being asked to go ever higher up the value chain, moving • Demonstrated value for money through a from the provision of technology, to services, to development, planning and oversight process business value. To the CIO's chagrin, both pressures that aligns technology investments with are real. IT must lower its cost, ensure service business needs continuity, and be more organizationally strategic. But while ITIL is the framework for consistent IT Service Management (ITSM) over time, it does not provide the tools needed to meet all of its goals. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a best practices framework created by the government of the United Leading organizations have found that a knowledgeempowered Service Resolution Management (SRM) Kingdom and increasingly adopted worldwide, provides at least part of the answer. By promoting implementation is one of the most beneficial and comprehensive solutions available to build and standard processes for planning. accelerate their ITIL initiatives. How can this be achieved?

"ITIL offers a public domain, nonproprietary framework for process and service management for heterogeneous environments. It brings with it a consistent, integrated approach and a vocabulary, which are valuable contributions to service management. However, it is only a framework..." What Is IT Infrastructure Library and Why Should I Care? Kris Brittain and Simon Mingay Gartner

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I^NOVA

Learning from External Customer Support

B efore SR M

The customer support industry provides a good model for IT service desks, as it was faced with just the same dilemma. Over the past decade or so, customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives were a high priority for service and support group. And, like ITIL, CRM practices provide a useful process framework. But they don't address the key problem: service resolution.

A fte r S R M

According to SSPA Research, customer support organizations spend 5% and 15% of their budgets on incident routing and tracking, respectively. These are the two processes directly addressed by CRM initiatives. But the meat of the work, service resolution —or actually solving customer problems—takes up to 80% of support resources. Just as with ITIL, CRM didn't provide any details or technology for getting support under control.

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What's Missing While ITIL is a powerful starting point for helping IT service delivery become more strategic and better managed, it doesn't specify the detailed processes or technology approaches for implementation. For instance, ITIL provides no details on how to: • Resolve service and support incidents more efficiently •

Empower staff to avoid incidents

• Identify the root cause of repeated or highimpact problems • Design reliable, usable, serviceable applications although it implies that all of these processes are important. So, while ITIL provides high-level guidance for recording an event, resolving the issue and reporting conditions, knowledge tied to business process is needed to resolve the issue.

Service Resolution Management Fills the Gap Fortunately, both CRM and ITIL can provide a comprehensive solution when partnered with a new approach to resolving customer issues: Service Resolution Management (SRM). SRM integrates tools and knowledge directly into service and support business processes—driving a truly integrated Service Desk model. It does this by guiding service desk staff and enterprise endusers through a personalized resolution workflow, optimized for the specifics of each incoming issue. SRM integrates everything needed to resolve

issues into the incident management process and the technology that supports it. Three key capabilities enable SRM: • Universal knowledge access. The service desk analyst must have seamless, easy access to all knowledge needed to resolve issues, no matter where stored. Vendor support content and manuals, support knowledge about proprietary applications, and policy information should all be available from a single SRM system. And it must be easy to capture and share new knowledge in the process of delivering support. • Adaptive resolution. The SRM system should optimize each resolution based on the specifics of each incident. If there is a specific document that answers a specific question (for example, for an error message), the service desk analyst should see it when first opening the incident. If there is a defined process for resolving a class of problems, the agent should be led through it. In all cases, specific problems define a managed process. • Seamless service. Incidents should be resolved consistently, whether submitted over the phone, by email or through the intranet. The self-help and incident submission workflows should be integrated, so self-help is used whenever possible but the service desk is available whenever necessary. And the same business process rules that optimize the service desk should also adapt self-help functionality to the needs of each user. By optimizing the process of delivering just the right knowledge and functionality to agents and end-users in a process tuned by business rules and optimized for each incident, SRM processes and technology fill the missing pieces in ITIL—just as they do for CRM.

"As companies around the world transform themselves for competition that is based on intellectual capital and information, their ability to exploit intangible assets such as knowledge and business process has become far more decisive than their ability to simply manage physical assets." - Pink Elephant

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Optimizing the ITIL Framework

ITIL comprises a series of documented processes. We consider the four primary processes below. • Enabling collaboration with other experts, including expert location

Optimizing Incident Management

• Auto-suggesting the right customer Incident Management is the process of detecting and response recording problems through to resolution and closure, and is where SRM delivers the clearest value. • Drafting incident notes As cited above, research shows 80% of the resources expended in resolving issues doesn't have anything to • Generating new knowledge from incident data do with incident "management" per se, but with to eliminate rework incident resolution, the focus of SRM. SRM makes Incident Management more efficient by: • Building an agent-ready summary of the

incident context by automatically extracting and presenting incident, customer and machine state information

• Generating interviews and script that guide

the service desk agent through a defined resolution process

• Searching effectively and accurately, guiding

users to the most relevant content

• Self-learning with each incident Additionally, in some environments, SRM goes beyond efficiency by keeping incidents out of the queue altogether with effective self-service that guides end users through their own resolution process. With SRM-driven self-service, end users can resolve known problems at their desks, quickly and conveniently.

Optimizing Availability Management Availability Management is the process responsible for ensuring that the availability of each service meets or exceeds its availability targets (usually set in Service Level Agreements, or SLAs) and is proactively improved on an ongoing basis. While the heart of availability management as defined in ITIL is to monitor, measure and report on

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availability, SRM can add an important proactive component to avoid problems altogether. SRM systems store configuration information for each system and user, or access this information in a centralized Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) as specified in ITIL. Using this information, SRM applications can proactively push highly relevant alerts, downloads and configuration health checks to end users or to IT system administrators. Working in conjunction with Problem Management processes, organizations can push fixes for resolved issues out to owners of other systems that might be susceptible to the same problems in a process called "find once / fix many."

Optimizing Service Management The Service Management process within Application Management concerns the release, delivery and optimization of the application. As with availability management, the goal of Service Management is to ensure that applications can meet their SLAs. SRM provides more informed requirements for upgrades and enhancements to deployed applications. Analysis of the use of knowledge and other resources in closing incidents provides insights into actual user concerns and patterns of use. For example, they help segregate issues that require "fixing the user" (i.e., usability issues) from "fixing the application" (i.e., reliability and availability issues). IT professionals often quip that "applications aren't released; they escape." This acknowledges

the many challenges that come with implementing a smooth release process within Service Management. Here again, SRM can help by supporting: • Knowledge capture in the beta or pilot process • Rapid identification and response to issues

in the roll-out

• Better management of release-time incident

spikes through knowledge reuse and self-service

Optimizing Problem Management Problem Management is the continuous improvement process built around Incident Management. It seeks to minimize the impact of problems and incidents to the business. It is built on the insight expressed by ITIL expert and Pink Elephant Executive Consultant George Spaulding that "a great first call resolution rate just means you're good at fixing the same problem over and over again." Problem Management focuses on engineering the problems out of the environment once and for all. The core of Problem Management is root cause analysis. This analysis is both time-consuming and error prone. One source of data for root cause analysis is incident categories. Unfortunately, these are often far too high-level to really identify the underlying cause of issues—even when they're correctly coded, which often isn't the case. So organizations serious about doing root cause analysis frequently drop down to analyze case notes within the Incident Management system, an extremely expensive and uncertain prospect.

Guiding Principles for Knowledge-empowered SRM in ITIL • • • •

• Capture new knowledge at the point that it is discovered and used Provide for a consistent QA process that is flexible enough to adapt to the unique needs of each organization Support an adaptive environment that ensures the most appropriate knowledge will be applied to each incident and problem Make sure the knowledge management system learns from each use so that the knowledge base is always current and consistent Allow knowledge sharing across organizational groups so that there is consistency across the entire IT organization

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(Trying to do the same thing from self-service search logs, where queries may average fewer than two words in length, is even harder.) With IT development organizations rightly skeptical of anecdotal or high-level input from the service desk, Problem Management often founders.

SRM processes and technologies complement and augment ITIL with KM and business process support to address the core issues required to deliver an efficient and strategic Service Desk. Through a combination of comprehensive resolution functionality, resolution processes optimized with business rules and continuous improvement, SRM suites can make ITIL a practical solution for IT.

Effective SRM processes close the loop and deliver actionable input for Problem Management. When In particular, SRM drives: structured, categorized knowledge (with root causes) is linked to incidents, it because straightforward to report on the causes of the most • Service Desk agent efficiency. Knova customers have seen typical interactions shorten by 20% common or highest impact incidents. Automated 40% through the deployment of SRM. classification of content, incidents, and searches makes incident coding universal, consistent, and • Problems out of the environment. SRM analytics accurate. provide a new level of visibility to incident root causes, difficult use cases, multi-vendor Conclusions interoperability issues and emerging problems. ITIL provides a proven framework for managing IT processes, and in particular for running the Service • Self-service. In addition to making the agent more efficient, process-enabled SRM also Desk. But ITIL requires the right tools to drive significant business results, especially in the areas of empowers end-users with knowledge and resolution capabilities directly on the Service Incident Management, Availability Management, Desk intranet. The cost of self-service is an order Service Management and Problem Management. of magnitude lower than assisted service. And, it empowers end-users, helping them avoid inconvenient or embarrassing calls.

About the Author Mark Angel has worked in the fields of knowledge management, search, statistics and software development for more than two decades. As CTO of Knova Software, Mr. Angel is responsible for the product and technology vision of the company. Mr. Angel joined Knova through the merger of ServiceWare and Kanisa. He founded Kanisa in 1997 and served as CEO until 1999. Under his leadership the company created an innovative knowledge management and search platform. The company's goal was to build enterprise applications that enable superior service delivery while reducing the cost of interaction by automating service resolution. The core KM technology underlying its applications is driven by several patent pending innovations Mr. Angel studied economics at the University of Chicago, and was a Truman Scholar in 1978.

About Knova Software Knova Software is a leading provider of Service Resolution Management (SRM) applications that reduce service and support costs, increase revenues and improve customer satisfaction. Built on a next-generation search and knowledge management platform, Knova's suite of knowledge-empowered customer service applications automate the resolution process across multiple channels including contact centers, service desks, email and self-service sites. Industry leaders including EDS, Ford, HP, H&R Block, Novell, Merrill Lynch, McAfee, Reuters and QUALCOMM rely on Knova's award-winning solutions to deliver world-class service and support. Knova Software is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information visit www.knova.com.

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