Support or technical support service is an ambulance that helps out businesses and users in case of all kinds of incidents with IT products.
For example, the support can check the performance of the site and prepare it for a high load on the days of the sale.
What is ITSM
What will change in the work of the company and the department supporting our work if we add another system, for example, introduce some kind of automation? Will we have to hire new employees and increase funding, or will the staff break away from personal affairs and cope with new tasks?
ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) is a way to answer these questions. This is the ideology of IT management as a set of services.
It includes all actions and management methods related to the provision of IT services to customers; activities include planning, design, operation and control of IT services.
ITSM is focused not on technology, but on the customer. Particular attention is paid to the continuous improvement of the process of providing IT services. Today, ITSM is seen as a professional discipline responsible for all the services that you can associate with the IT department.
Within the framework of this ideology, a service provider (for example, an IT department or an in—house operation department) or an outsourcer service company provides the customer with some services with measurable characteristics, for example, maintains the operability of the corporate email system with the opening of new mailboxes, setting up an anti-spam filter, or ensures the continuous operation of the transport monitoring system. And all the parameters of this service are spelled out in a special agreement — SLA, which is made up of both interested parties — both IT and business.
What is ITIL
ITSM is based on the library of best practices — ITIL. This library contains detailed descriptions of the experience of IT departments and companies around the world. It was developed by the Department of Government Trade of Great Britain by order of the Government of the country to restore order in the IT of public institutions. Representatives of manufacturers, users and IT solutions consultants participated in the working group. As a result, the collection turned out to be so successful that other service departments and companies adopted the approach.
The main ideas of ITIL 4
ITIL 4 describes how to create a service that will be of value to the customer. In general, the so-called value chain, which includes six steps, is responsible for this process:
- planning;
- improvement;
- interaction;
- design and transformation;
- receiving/creature;
- provision and support.
The sequence of these steps is built by each organization itself. But each step is viewed from four angles:
- organizations and people,
- information and technology,
- partners and contractors,
- flows and processes.
Advantages of ITSM for your business
Aleks Yenin, Polontech Principal Consultant and ITIL / ITSM expert, believes that “the main value of ITSM is that this ideology “builds” bridges between customers and service providers who speak different languages — for example, between IT with its technical terms and a business interested in financial efficiency, or between a service company that ensures the continuous operation of security equipment and the school director”
ITSM helps to ensure the standardization of processes, regardless of the people who are involved in providing the service and maintaining it in the agreed form. The approach provides tools for measuring the quality of service in any form, so it allows you to answer strategic questions, for example, regarding the profitability of maintaining a department or outsourcing some of its functions.
ITSM highlights and visualizes workflows. The approach helps to find points where optimization is possible. By eliminating unnecessary actions, ITSM increases the profitability of the business.
The effectiveness of the support service largely depends on which ITSM system you choose: whether it will be possible to quickly fulfill requests, maintain a knowledge base, and whether it will be convenient to train new employees.
The development team can maintain its own product or invite a contractor. In any case, at the start, you need to determine the requirements for the Support service and choose a program for managing applications.
How to implement ITIL / ITSM in your support system? – Start with Service Desk
Service Desk or helpdesk system is software for automating the work of a department or service company that works with user or customer requests. Implementing ITIL recommendations, such solutions help to break down the service to automate the processes of registration, distribution, execution of applications, logging of all activities, prioritization of requests and much more. Thus, communication with applicants or clients is carried out and recorded in one place, and according to the collected analytics, the company can find points of improvement in the quality of service provision.
ITSM tool (Service Desk module) integration
Project board in Jira Service Management
Many of our clients needed both technical support and development services. To manage the development, our team used Atlassian products extensively, so we needed to support data exchange between all these systems.
So, we often provide ITSM processes integration based on Jira. It gives many teams the following advantages:
- A lot of ready-made extensions and the ability to write your own extensions.
- Convenient reporting and analytics.
- Task execution control (changing the group of task performers, prioritizing and urgency of the task).
- High level of security.
- The system is suitable for both small and large companies.
- Integration with Confluence and other solutions for project work.
- A simple entry threshold for new employees.
- To-do lists available for each employee.
At Polontech (ITSM leader and expert company), having 10+ years of experience, we automate business processes based on different ITSM vendors software, Agile and ITSM frameworks, and ITSM processes integration became extremely popular in the context of a pandemic starting in 2020.
Summing it Up
Technical support in various situations is necessary for every IT product – from small online stores operating within the same city to the largest retailers and banks.
You can service the product yourself or get the help of a professional service provider. In any case, it is important to carefully choose which ITSM system your specialists will work with. The speed and quality of support largely depend on whether the selected program meets the requirements of your team.