Pragmatic ITIL

How Nimsoft Service Desk Makes it Easier than Ever to Leverage ITIL

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction: ITILs Payoff Not Guaranteed ................................................................................................................... 3 Nimsoft Service Desk: Maximizing the Benets of ITIL................................................................................................ 3
Prot from Deep ITIL Expertise..........................................................................................................................................................4 Streamline ITIL Deployment ...............................................................................................................................................................4 Gain Insights from Comprehensive, Off-the-shelf Reports .........................................................................................................4 Harness ITIL Throughout the Organization .................................................................................................................................... 5

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................................6

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Executive Summary
While the consensus around the benets of ITIL is virtually universal, the reality is that organizations ITIL initiatives run the gamut both in terms of costs and benets. Your service management platform can play a huge role in the degree to which you realize the potential benets of ITIL in your organization. By combining ITIL-based best practices in a solution that is easy to congure and deploy, Nimsoft Service Desk offers a truly pragmatic way to get the most out of ITIL in your organization.

Introduction: ITILs Payoff Not Guaranteed

ITIL has become the most broadly adopted standard for service management, and for good reason. By leveraging ITIL concepts in their service desk operations, many organizations have optimized their processes and so realized improved efficiency, speed, and service levels. For anyone who has tried to implement ITIL, however, it is clear that theres a big gulf between understanding the theoretical benets of ITIL and realizing them in practice. Here are a few reasons this has traditionally been the case: Big up-front commitment. Building ITIL-based workows and capabilities into your service desk can take considerable up-front investment, both in staff education and in platform procurement. In many organizations, adopting ITIL takes a large process engineering effort as well. Further, organizations have been required to do extensive customization work in order to adapt the service desk platforms to the new processes. The result is that it is not uncommon for ITIL-based service desk initiatives to take six months or more.

For anyone who has tried to implement ITIL, however, it is clear that theres a big gulf between understanding the theoretical benets of ITIL and realizing them in practice.

Standard open to interpretation. After investing all the time and money required, your organization still isnt assured of the benets youre seeking. ITIL is not fully prescriptive; it is a broad standard that leaves a lot of room for interpretation and many different ways to apply to the specics of your business. Consequently, the results an organization actually experiences can vary dramatically, with some enjoying only marginal gains, if any at all, while others realize signicant improvements. Platform certication no guarantee. It is important to note that, even if your organization deploys an ITIL-certied platform, strong improvements arent by any means assured. In essence, ITIL certication means that a tool can be implemented in a way that supports ITIL. The degree to which a given solution enables and streamlines ITIL adoptionand helps your businesscan vary substantially, depending on the platform deployed. To sum it up: Your results may vary.

Nimsoft Service Desk: Maximizing the Benets of ITIL

Nimsoft Service Desk is an IT service management solution that enables your organization to get maximum benet from ITIL with minimal cost and effort. Nimsoft Service Desk equips you with action-based workows built on ITIL standards to manage, coordinate, and optimize all aspects of service delivery. With its leading combination of ITIL-based best practices, pre-packaged workows, and easy conguration, Nimsoft Service Desk helps you reduce the up-front investment typically associated with ITIL initiativesand it boosts the chances of your organization gaining the most benet from these endeavors.

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Prot from Deep ITIL Expertise

Compared to many legacy solutions, which have been retrotted to align with ITIL, Nimsoft Service Desk was built on an ITIL foundation from the outset of development. In addition, the solution was crafted by ITIL experts who were seasoned service providers in the service management arena. With years of practical experience in applying ITIL principles in customer environments, the team at Nimsoft understands how to apply ITIL efficiently, cost effectively, and scalably.

Streamline ITIL Deployment

Nimsoft Service Desk has all the core ITIL best practices embedded in the solutioncomplete with pre-built workows that are fully integrated and available for you to use immediately. Nimsoft Service Desk offers workows that cover all core service management processes, including incident assignment, escalation, SLA tracking, and more. (See sidebar for a complete list of modules.) Consequently, rather than having to do a lot of customized process engineering, Nimsoft Service Desk enables you to leverage automated, pre-congured processes. These processes represent all the core capabilities your organization requires, right out of the gateeffectively jump starting the bulk of the work needed to get your ITIL service desk running. Further, as opposed to other solutions that require labor-intensive custom coding, with Nimsoft Service Desk, your team can use an intuitive point-andclick interface to do the remaining work required to congure the solution to the specic needs of your business. As a result, while its common for other service desk deployments to take several months, Nimsoft customers can go from kickoff to production in about 4-6 weeks.

Nimsoft Service Desk features modules for these critical areas in service management: Incident Problem Request Change Service Asset and Conguration Knowledge Service Level Event* Availability Management *

* Available as part of Nimsoft Unied Manager.

Leverage a Central Data Model

ITIL recommends centralization and cross-referential integration of data, which is key to efficient, intelligent service management operations. Nimsoft Service Desk supports this by having an integrated, unied data infrastructure. The solution features a conguration management database (CMDB) that acts as the central repository for data that underpins all capabilities, including incident management, change management, and more. The CMDB gives your technical team everything they need in one place. Whether your staff is responding to incoming incidents or using the CMDB to help plan changes, Nimsoft Service Desk keeps it all coordinated.

Gain Insights from Comprehensive, Off-the-shelf Reports

Nimsoft Service Desk offers the comprehensive reporting capabilities that are key to supporting ITIL principles and delivering the information needed to facilitate continual process renements. The solution features pre-built, customizable reports that cover such areas as ticket volumes, ticket backlog, average incident duration, SLA compliance, and more.

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Featuriing Nimsoft Service Desk and Nimsoft Monitor, Nimsoft Unied Manager delivers complete capabilities for coordinating service delivery and for monitoring the entire IT infrastructure. This solution enables organizations to gain unrivaled efficiency and control in IT management.

Harness ITIL Throughout the Organization

Through its ITIL support and comprehensive, integrated capabilities, Nimsoft Service Desk enables you to fully leverage process efficiencies across your organization. Following are just a couple examples of how Nimsoft Service Desk has been proven to support broader IT and business initiatives: IT governance and compliance. The IT team at a retailer needed to support a host of tasks to ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). The retailer integrated Nimsoft Service Desk with this effort, automating the standards change requirements, for example initiating password changes and server patches. Nimsoft Service Desk helped to streamline compliance efforts by automating the initiation of ongoing tasks, approvals, and workows. Further, by centrally capturing conguration snapshots, logging, and assignments, the solution made compliance reporting, tracking, and auditing far faster, more accurate, and more efficient. 5 | Pragmatic ITIL

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HR support. Like many other organizations, a large nancial institution used separate systems for change management and employee on boarding. After deploying Nimsoft Service Desk, the organization was able to centrally manage all the IT functions associated with these various processes. Now, for example, if an HR manager signs off on a new hire, they can submit a request directly in the solutions online interface, which can trigger all associated IT tasks, such as setting up an Active Directory account, conguring a new PC, and so on.

Learn More
To learn more about Nimsoft Service Desk and how it can help your business: Sign up for a free trial of Nimsoft Service Desk at the following url: http://www.nimsoft.com/free-trial Visit the Nimsoft Service Desk page: http://www.nimsoft.com/ solutions/nimsoft-service-desk

Conclusion
The potential upsides of ITIL can be signicant, but, for many organizations, the up-front commitment and investment required to adopt ITIL can outweigh the benets realized. By packaging ITIL-based workows in an easy-to-use IT service management platform, Nimsoft Service Desk enables support organizations to practically, efficiently, and cost effectively get the most from their ITIL initiatives.

About Nimsoft
Nimsoft provides integrated, modern IT management solutions for more than 1,000 enterprise and service provider customers globally, including 1&1, CDW, SoftLayer, SunGard Availability Services, Sur La Table, TriNet, and Virgin America. The companys Nimsoft Unied Manager is an industry-leading solution that helps organizations easily monitor and manage IT services in increasingly complex business environments. Nimsoft products integrate with existing solutions at any point from the data center to the cloud, and are available on a pay-as-you-go basis. For more information, visit www.nimsoft.com.

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