Service Support

This software is concerned with ensuring that the User has access to the appropriate business services and provides for the following to ensure the provision of a managed environment with the appropriate mechanisms to service and support the end customer, primarily being:

• Service Desk
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Release Management

These areas represent Planwell's core specialty at both the Mid Tier and Enterprise organisation.

Service Desk

Strategically, the Service Desk is the most important function in an IT service support organization. It is the main customer contact with the IT organization and a key driver of customer perception and satisfaction.

Service Desk application Software should be an extremely flexible and user-friendly application designed to be the main application used by IT staff to manage all incoming service and support requests. The service desk should provide for a multi-channel (Web, phone, email, desktop client) customer request interface for information, install/move/add/change, incidents, and problems.

Within the IT organization, the Service Desk provides a common tool to automate and integrate service delivery and service support process and procedures within and between IT functional or regional groups, third party resources, and other parts of the enterprise.

Planwell offers several solutions for measuring the end user experience and raising alerts to the Service Desk and the Operations department if the agreed/expected Service Levels are not being met.

Ancillary areas to the service desk that Planwell offers expertise and where the value of Service Deks can be leveraged include;

• Knowledge Management
• Alerting Systems (Such as SMS and Radio Pagers)
• Computer Telephone Interface (CTI) Integration (for screen pop population)

Incident Management

The primary goal of the ITIL Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the highest possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.

Remedy Help Desk is designed as the main support tool used by IT staff to manage the complex process of resolving incidents. Incoming service requests may be submitted by the customer service desk staff, or automatically, using system management tools such as BMC Software’s PATROL Enterprise Manager or BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM) solutions.

Problem Management

The primary goals of the ITIL Problem Management process are to minimize the adverse impact of errors within the IT Infrastructure and to prevent recurring incidents related to these errors.

BMC Software’s overall problem management strategy is:

• To fix problems automatically whenever possible, e.g. Pool Advisor will dynamically correct the DB2 buffer pools in response to changing workload, thereby improving performance and throughput.
• If it is not possible to automatically fix the problem, then we will raise the appropriate alert (via web, email, phone etc.) to the relevant personnel – e.g. in the event of a scheduling error, CONTROL-M will raise alerts in PATROL.

To give the business view of the problem, so that the impact on the critical business services can be determined.

Problem Management capabilities in Remedy Help Desk include the prioritization, routing, tracking, and resolution of problems. Out-of-box integration of Incident Management and Problem Management processes allows the IT support staff to identify a problem, and to identify all other incidents related to that problem. Changes in the environment are then implemented with a ‘Request for Change’ – a change request in the Remedy Change Management application.

Change Management

The primary goal of the ITIL Change Management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality. Although changes often arise as a result of unplanned problems, many also arise from planned requests for change from the business or IT organization.

Remedy Change Management delivers a best-practice process to systematically manage the response to a change request in accordance with the ITIL framework.

Remedy Change Management considers business and technical impact, impact on other services, the effect of not implementing the change, as well as resources required. It includes use of a back out plan and a robust approval server that manages the request through a complex approval and implementation process.

BMC Software also has a range of solutions for making and tracking changes to Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) like DB2, UDB, ORACLE, IMS etc., thus delivering greater availability and faster response to business requirements.

BMC also has solutions for analyzing the potential impact of changes with our Perform/Predict product line, thus enabling customers to make investment decisions based on true business service needs.

Configuration Management

The primary goal of the ITIL Configuration Management process is to account for and verify the configuration records of all the components of the IT infrastructure, as well as provide accurate information to support all other support processes, including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Release Management.

Remedy Asset Management is Remedy’s integrated capability for capturing and maintaining IT configuration data for assets and the relationship between them, including software, hardware, documentation, and processes. It provides the Inventory Configuration Management Database that maintains a record of all configuration items that make up the IT infrastructure, such as model, serial number, physical location, user, owner, maintenance contract information, lease, warranty, and financial information.

Configuration item data is seamlessly integrated with Remedy Help Desk, Remedy Change Management, and Remedy Service Level Agreements.

Release Management

This discipline of IT Service Management is the management of all software configuration items within the organization. It is responsible for the management of software development, installation and support of an organization’s software products.