The implementation of service support standards provides organizations with the opportunity to differentiate their business and service offerings from their competitors. To be successful, an organization must make an honest assessment of its current position and use this as the basis for planning its future achievements.
To successfully provide predictable, high quality service, businesses must develop formalized processes that are constantly monitored and reviewed. In order to achieve this, the service desk application adopted by the organization must tightly integrate Incident, Problem and Change Management with an easy-to-use workflow engine and the Service Level Management process. To ensure the cost effectiveness of IT infrastructure, an embedded CMDB must be easily accessible to the change management team.
To guarantee the service desk is running at an optimum level and meeting its service targets, reports should be easy to generate and readily distributed to the relevant parties. And as customer communication is paramount for maintaining satisfaction, this should be provided through multiple channels, including email and a customer portal. A central port of knowledge should also be readily accessible to re-cycle useful information and solutions, but also empower customers to provide their own fixes.
The change process required to implement a culture of service and support, requires support across the organization as a whole. A standards-based approach such as ITIL provides the guidelines for making the change, which result in the alignment of business objectives and customer needs with IT infrastructure that provides benefits across all facets of the organization and ultimately to the bottom-line.