Service Desk Course

CA Service Desk Manager (CA SDM) enables you to prevent service disruptions, better manage change risks, and provide a 360-degree view into your IT services. This industry-proven solution with its comprehensive feature set is now delivered on-premise or on-demand for unprecedented flexibility.

CA SDM is a versatile, comprehensive IT service support solution designed to help you deliver superior end-user support through tight integrations with request, incident, problem, change,knowledge and service asset and configuration management processes.

CA SDM takes advantage of the growing use of social media with its tight integration with CA Open Space, an easy-to-use collaboration add-on that brings people and knowledge together to brainstorm, solve problems and share information. This native Web 2.0 application is delivered as a service and enables your users to self-help and resolve issues without having to submit an incident.

Business value

Modern IT organizations are evolving into service providers with an increased pressure to do more with less. IT requires a comprehensive approach to customer-focused and demand-driven service support with end-to-end processes and the ability to measure business value. Companies implementing this holistic service support strategy, replacing the traditional siloed approach, are achieving greater efficiency and productivity while reducing costs. For example:

A leading global IT outsourcing firm views CA SDM’s integration of incident, problem, change, and knowledge management as the key to efficiently delivering services to 21 customers with 160,000 end users in 35 countries. CA SDM is helping to manage over 150,000 incidents per month by maximizing analyst efficiency and is instrumental in moving its customers to standardized, ITIL-based processes for greater IT service consistency.

A large IT service provider improved analyst efficiency by over 15 percent, reduced staff overtime, and boosted the quality of its services by using CA SDM to identify customer trends around change requests.

One of the United Kingdom’s leading department stores uses CA SDM to track over 1,400 incidents a week with up to 25 percent of these (going to 45 percent in the near future) being logged via self-service which are then automatically routed to the appropriate support team. CA SDM’s self-service capabilities are helping users solve their own IT issues with up to 15 percent of issues now being resolved without direct involvement from IT.

A large financial institution is addressing 99 percent of requests raised internally within the agreed SLA using CA SDM. Using ITIL methodology they were able to greatly reduce meantime-to-resolution (MTTR) and repeat incidents. CA SDM is supporting 5 different help desks servicing around 75,000 requests per month across 1,725 branches with approximately 55,000 internal branch users and 1,200 analysts.

Overview

Holistic service support—visibility into IT silos

IT often creates multiple silos, each making changes as fast as possible, with no single team monitoring for conflicting changes or collisions. Due to the reactive nature of traditional IT, many change conflicts are not fixed until after the business has been impacted. In today’s complex IT environments that include teams spanning the globe, the silo model is no longer sustainable. An automated “manager of managers” to manage changes across all of your silos is a necessity.

CA SDM delivers sophisticated change management capabilities, providing visibility into all scheduled changes in the enterprise. CA SDM features an open change management process,including best practice process flows aligned to ITIL that can be integrated with disparate change silos to provide a single point of control for true enterprise change management. As the single point of control, CA SDM can integrate your changes from multiple sources so all changes can be viewed together and in context for proper risk assessment and change impact.

Inserted end-to-end processes

The traditional mandate for internal IT and IT service support providers is to deliver improved service quality and control support costs. However, constant service disruptions and system outages challenge them daily. These challenges inhibit end-user performance and contribute to lower productivity and overall business performance.

CA SDM automates industry-proven best practices for request, incident, problem, change, knowledge and service asset and configuration management. With these interlocking processes in place along with full-featured self-help capabilities, your IT analysts address fewer redundant user requests and correctly respond to service outages. Your IT organization can enhance user productivity and proactively support the key technology requirements of the business.

Resolve IT problems faster, manage risks, and save costs

If you have a home-grown or outdated help desk that no longer meets your needs, or are struggling with multiple, incompatible help desk environments as a result of mergers and acquisitions, managing service desk processes can be a difficult feat. Often, the processes used to resolve end users’ requests simply break down. Information silos act as barriers to responsiveness and resolution, and IT doesn’t have the necessary visibility into the infrastructure to successfully support its services. With a centralized service desk, CA SDM provides you with the solution to investigate and resolve problems, and to assess the risk of change while helping your end users automatically solve their own issues and capitalize on the IT organization’s knowledge.

Unlock the collective wisdom of your company’s many communities

Today’s more mobile and decentralized workforce is driving a cultural shift to online collaboration for issue resolution. Providing usable, easy to use self-service means having consolidated relevant information at the user’s fingertips—which is no easy task. With the integration of CA SDM with CA Open Space, we can help you overcome these challenges, in addition to helping lower your company’s support costs and reducing the burden on your IT analyst community. This powerful collaboration platform connects users to other users and subject matter experts, and also connects users to internal and external knowledge sources. The ability to capture new knowledge based on problems already resolved provides for continuous improvement in reducing the volume of incidents and shorter MTTR if an incident is opened and handed off to CA SDM.

Features

CA SDM acts as a single point of contact for all users. It expedites the restoration of service and helps to manage future events from adversely impacting business services, while also helping to improve IT staff efficiency. CA SDM delivers a more effective end-to-end service support solution via intuitive, easily adopted, enterprise-scale technology:

Native support for the flow of ITIL processes request, incident, problem, change, service asset and configuration and knowledge management, and complemented with support automation and workflow processes. This integrated and interoperable environment also provides fully configured user interfaces tailored per user per role to maximize efficiency.

Change management provides the ability to manage change across the enterprise by providing the visibility needed to make infrastructure and application decisions based on a better understanding of business impacts. Utilizing the configuration management database (CMDB), changes are evaluated and conflicts involving the same configuration item (CI) are automatically displayed.

Service asset and configuration management provides the foundation for a comprehensive configuration management system (CMS) for greater management control over your IT environment by providing a consolidated view of CIs and their interdependencies.

CMS/CMDB with application dependency mapping enables you to automatically discover inventories, and store CI data and relationship information gathered from multiple sources to link services with their underpinning CIs. Analysts can perform change impact analysis and do a more thorough root cause analysis.

Self-help support provides users a personalized self-service portal with information on outages and their existing requests, as well as intelligent solution search and notification,integrated password reset, chat, and automated repair options along with analyst-driven remote repair.

CA Open Space option effectively leverages community conversations along with federated internal and external searches (community, Google, knowledge base, SharePoint) to help users find answers to their issues. You can weave in CA Open Space into your intranet and web pages with prebuilt, extensible UI connectors, portlets and native iPhone and iPad mobile applications.

Knowledge management uses the knowledge repository to help connect IT with the business it supports by presenting accurate, authoritative, timely, and consistent information tailored to the needs of end users and service desk analysts. Additionally, end users have access to this knowledge through CA SDM self-service portal and CA Open Space.

Support automation helps IT support analysts to remotely fix requests and incidentsquickly and cost effectively by providing proven resolution tools and techniques to identify,diagnose, and resolve difficulties before they impact vital business processes.

CA Productivity Accelerator option provides automated, visual training to analysts when required, all in the context of the task and process being worked. The CA Productivity Accelerator speeds time–to-value lowering training costs and improving adherence to best practices.

Multi-tenancy enables multiple independent tenants (organizations or departments) to share a single implementation of CA SDM. Within the multi-tenant architecture, tenant data and configurations are virtually separated so that each client organization works with its customized virtual instance. CA SDM provides the granular user and data access controls to permit/deny sharing of configuration, process, contacts, and content between tenant groups to support customer defined policy.

CA Process Automation is a robust, enterprise-class run book automation tool providing repeatable and extensible automation that maximizes business efficiencies across departments and integrates and optimizes IT operations across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Reporting and analytics provide high-level graphical overviews of service desk and knowledge management operations to help with real-time analysis and integrated decision support. This is designed to help service desk, change, and other IT managers gain immediate visibility into key performance indicators, critical operational metrics and day-today activities.

Delivery approach

CA Service Desk Manager is part of the Service Management family of solutions from CA Technologies that enable you to facilitate end-to-end service support processes on-premise or on-demand. Receive maximum value from your investment in CA Technologies solutions by leveraging the expertise of CA Services. Through our proven deployment methodology and best practices, we help you implement solutions in a way that accelerates time-to-value and lowers risk. CA Education helps you maximize your business results with CA Technologies software by delivering robust training solutions that develop agile, competent, and proactive professionals who can successfully support your IT requirements. For added investment protection and enhancement there is CA Support, the place to go for easy access to technical support resources that are always available.

Benefits

CA SDM helps improve service support and quality while lowering IT costs by enabling your IT organization to:

Combine service support offerings that are typically standalone into a complete, single product. Give your customers greater value faster, and with a lower total cost of ownership,by simplifying the approach to service support.

Include a multi-tenant architecture supporting service desk consolidation for global enterprises and service providers.

Empower analysts with intuitive request, incident, problem resolution and instructional information, while helping the support environment run more efficiently and effectively.

Manage all changes, minimizing service disruptions and risks resulting from unforeseen change, improving the day-to-day operations of the organization.

Offload service issues to low-cost self-help channels and increase IT responsiveness to the business with advanced self-help and remote support automation.

Enable users to self-help and collaborate to reduce the number of open incidents and MTTR by using the power of collaboration, community and federated search.

Why CA Technologies

CA Service Desk Manager provides a comprehensive approach to service management by uniting traditionally separate offerings into the industry’s most comprehensive, single ITIL-based service desk technology:

Offers stand-alone service support all in a complete, single product simplifying the approach to service support and helping customers achieve greater value quickly at a lower total cost of ownership.

Drives down IT support costs and increases IT responsiveness to the business with advanced self-service, knowledge management, and remote support automation.

Provides automated and visual training to user’s on-demand, in the context of the task and process they are working on. CA Productivity Accelerator can help speed your time–tovalue,lower training costs, improve adherence to best practices and preserve institutional knowledge.

Offers a 60- to 90-day time-to-value with fixed-price Rapid Implementation Service Offerings backed by documented deployment methodologies based on ITIL®, CoBIT® and ISO best practices.

Delivers out-of-the-box integration with governance, security, application, datacenter and infrastructure management solutions to drive cross-IT collaboration around a common business-centric service perspective.