Maturity model for Service Desk Optimization

Your organization can reach the next step of service desk maturity through best practices adoption and native BMC product process integration. The following maturity model helps you optimize rollout of Service Desk Optimization in phases.

This topic describes the following phases:

Phase 1 — Best practices standardization and processes simplification

The model starts with your organization adopting best practices from the BMC Service Management Process Model for your service desk and incident management processes. You can then use the model to form your problem management practice. After your organization understands the complexity of the environment, it can begin to consolidate and centralize applications, education, and process tools to a manageable and economic set.

The goals for best practices standardization and processes simplification are to:

Reduce operational and capital expenses
Standardize processes and tools to improve resource utilization
Implement controls to meet business obligations (for example, controls include service targets configured when using the BMC Service Level Management product)
Increase user satisfaction
Enable rapid adoption of best practices
Provide the business with key performance data

Phase 2 — Incident management

As part of this phase, your support organizations must scrutinize all of the parts required to provide incident management services: process tools; service desk ticketing systems; inboard and outboard messaging and notification tools; data, event, or request input sources; and measurement and monitoring tools.

The goals for incident management are to:

Resolve incidents within designated targets
Resolve incidents without assistance from other groups
Decrease the number of reopened incidents
Decrease the number of backlogged incidents

The Incident Management feature of the BMC Service Desk product provides a number of procedures for handling incident requests from users.

Phase 3 — Problem management and knowledge management

One challenge facing IT Support organizations is indoctrinating problem management processes as distinct and separate activities apart from the incident management team. To achieve this, you must embrace the full process model for problem management. One of the outputs of the problem management processes is the creation and dissemination of knowledge resulting from the root-cause analysis of problems.

Problem management

The goals for problem management are to:

Decrease the number of recurring incidents
Decrease the number of problems in the backlog
Increase the number of level 1 restoration activities

When your service desk has incorporated the Incident Management and Problem Management features of BMC Service Desk, and uses optimized best practices, you can take the next step by automating many processes and activities. You can achieve automation by using the industry-leading workflow solution BMC Remedy Action Request System, a core component to the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite, and BMC Atrium Orchestrator. BMC Atrium Orchestrator enables you to implement the BMC workload process across multiple computing environments, applications, and scripted tasks. With workflow and run book automation, you can create a real tangible change management lifecycle that carries instructions, information, data, and activities from the first incident all the way through to deployment and installation.

Knowledge management

The goal of knowledge management is to reduce incident volume through automated self-service and by providing service personnel with quick answers to questions submitted through the service desk.

The BMC Knowledge Management application provides a framework for creating, publishing, reviewing, and searching knowledge articles. The application provides service desk analysts with a knowledge base of easy-to-find solutions and gives users self-service search options to help them resolve issues on their own.

Phase 4 — Change, event, and performance management

This phase focuses on change, event, and performance management.

Change management

The primary objective of change management is to enable beneficial changes with minimum disruption to IT services.

Additional goals for change management are to:

Increase the number of successful changes
Decrease the amount of time required to assess and plan changes
Decrease the approval process time
Decrease the number of changes in the backlog

The BMC Change Management application applies a repeatable process for production changes to improve the stability of business service and required changes. BMC Change Management (and Release Management) delivers comprehensive policy, process management, and planning capabilities that help you to increase the speed and consistency with which you implement changes, while minimizing business risk and disruption.

Event management

Organizations can achieve rapid maturity by integrating their service desks with event monitoring capabilities. They can use the BMC ProactiveNet product to shift from reactive to proactive IT management.

The goals for event management are to:

Decrease the number of repetitive events
Decrease outages resulting from changes
Increase the number of changes correlated to events

To integrate event management with incident management, you need to understand what an event is, how it should be evaluated for impact, and what should be done with that event.

BMC ProactiveNet is an integrated platform that combines event management and data analytics (including baselines, abnormality detection, and Root Cause Analysis algorithms) in a single seamless solution. Event management lets you proactively detect and resolve IT problems before they have an impact on critical IT systems. Data analytics let you collect metrics data from your infrastructure components to detect abnormalities, predict outages, and provide deep diagnostic information.

For more information about Event Management, see Working with events.

Performance management

Performance management helps to optimize application performance by baselining application behavior, predicting problems before they occur, pinpointing root causes, and initiating standardized triage and resolution.

The BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite learns and baselines the behavior of your applications and IT infrastructure, collects and processes events from a wide variety of sources, predicts problems before they occur; automatically pinpoints probable-cause across technology silos, and initiates standardized problem triage and resolution processes. The BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite optimizes application performance by reducing the number of outages, speeding mean time to repair, and improving operational efficiency through out-of-the-box automation and integration. For more information, see BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite.