Questions You Might Have on Advancing Your ITSM Strategies in 2023

If there is one word that describes how our ITSM webinar, it would be “Super-Duper-Insightful!“. Okay! That is actually looking like three words. 😊

On the 25^th of January 2023, we had over 80 I.T. Professionals join us as we discussed “Advancing Your ITSM Strategies in 2023“, and we thought to share answers to some questions you might have on advancing your ITSM strategies in 2023.

What Is ITSM? Introduction to I.T. Service Management

ITSM is how I.T. teams manage the end-to-end delivery of services to end users. This includes all the processes and activities involved in designing, developing, delivering, and supporting I.T. services. It seems this looks like a MOUTHFUL! So, let’s say in simple words, ITSM is how I.T. services are managed in an organisation.

What Are the Benefits of ITSM? Why Is It Important?
Have you ever gotten frustrated at your I.T. department, probably because your P.C. is having issues, and it’s taking forever to get an I.T. member to come to your aid? Okay, let’s turn the tables; as an I.T. professional, do you at times find it overwhelming to attend to every service request and prioritise crucial tasks?

If you can relate to any of the above scenarios, it’s a clear sign that you need a better ITSM strategy for your organisation.

A proper ITSM strategy will help you achieve the following:

Improve employee and company productivity
Reduce I.T. operational costs
Reduce business downtime
Promote a positive end-user experience
Streamline communication by enhancing a faster incident response
Boost self-service among end-users
Manage changes more efficiently
Reduce unnecessary workload

I’m sure you’re getting excited, and you’d like to get busy making some BIG changes in your organisation. But beyond just knowing what ITSM is and its benefits, it’s essential also to understand how to implement some advanced ITSM strategies in your business to ensure its exponential growth in the coming days.

SolarWinds Service Desk answers the question of, “How do I improve my organisation’s ITSM strategy?”. SolarWinds Service Desk is a cloud-based and AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) platform built to maximise productivity and accelerate resolution with lightning-fast time to value.

It has features such as:

Asset discovery and management
Self-service portal
Release and deployment management
Software licensing management
Incident management
Help-desk knowledge base

I wouldn’t be able to do enough justice in explaining all of the robust and valuable features of SolarWinds Service Desk, but gladly, we were able to show a demo of it in our ITSM webinar. You can catch up with the webinar replay on YouTube, too: WATCH HERE!

We have curated answers to some questions you might have on advancing your ITSM strategies in 2023 using SolarWinds Service Desk solution.

Q&A Session

Do you have an area on SolarWinds Service Desk the most used knowledge base items are available to browse for our environments? You can have a widget available to see popular solutions available in your organisation; under the knowledge articles, you can filter the view by the “most popular”, “most viewed”, “highlighted”, and “last updated”.

Can a technician create his own personalised view of the tickets on SolarWinds Service Desk? Yes! The views can be customised by a technician to his own taste, and this won’t affect other technicians’ views.

Do you have a workflow process for change requests and CMDB development? Yes, there is a change catalogue available for creating all different changes, and you can also define the processes there.

Can you add custom SQL to conditions, or are they only GUI based? You can only put conditions on the GUI; there is no need for coding. In GUI, you can have all your configurations set. As a technician, you can create and define all of the automation rules you want from the start.

Are the honeycomb similar incidents automated or does the Administrator choose what to show from a different area, and those are presented each time that keyword is used.? There is an algorithm that automatically fetches information using A.I., so results are presented based on keywords.

Can you define the type of job a technician handles, e.g., only networking problems? Yes, you can set roles and permissions for each of your technicians, so if there are any tickets related or addressed to them, it will go directly to the right technician.

How do I integrate NPM with the SolarWinds Service Desk to achieve automation? There is an out-of-the-box capability of SolarWinds Service Desk that allows you to integrate your Orion platform to help reduce your mean time to detection and resolution. With this, you can automatically convert alerts on the Orion to tickets and assign them to the right technician(s), and once it is resolved, it automatically marks them as resolved.

How is SolarWinds Service Desk licensed? SolarWinds Service Desk is licensed based on the number of technicians, and you can support unlimited end-users.

For Asset Management, it is licensed based on I.P. address discoverable devices that will be automatically identified by the discovery agent, and you can also manage all your other non-IP address devices for FREE!

Can we manage devices that are not on the network? From the “Other Assets” section under the “Assets Tab”, you can add all those devices that are under your network manually here, or if you have them listed in a .csv file format, you can import them using the template from the “Other Assets” section.

Can custom forms be created at ticket closure to capture necessary resolution details? Yes! You can create custom forms to capture the satisfaction level of the end user. From the survey tab, you can create your forms and set rules for their delivery.

Do we have a base cost of license per technician? Yes. The base cost for a technician license is the Team license at $228 for 1 technician for 1 year.

Can SolarWinds Service Desk be integrated with Active Directory for staff log-in? Yes! You can integrate with Active Directory. The integration is done through OKTA. And you can use the integration for user provisioning and single sign-on (SSO).

Also, do you have an auto report, Power B.I. integration, and integration with Microsoft Teams chat to submit auto-ticket? Yes, on the Professional plan, you can schedule reports to be auto-generated by the platform and sent to specified recipients. We have integration with Power B.I. We also have integration with Microsoft Teams for ticket creation, follow-up, and updates.

Do you have a workflow process for connection with Active Directory? Yes. The integration with Active Directory for users, managers, and groups can be used in a workflow process.

If you have any other questions you would like to ask about ITSM or SolarWinds Service Desk, you can send an email to discover@ha-shem.com.

Cheers!