LANDesk White Paper

Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

A Step-by-Step Approach

Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................. 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 3 Bringing Affordable, Step-by-Step ITSM to the Mid-Market ..................................... 4 Step 1: It All Starts with Endpoint Configuration Management ................................. 4 Step 2: Implement a Help Desk ............................................................................... 4 Step 3: Apply Asset Management............................................................................ 5 Step 4: Extend to Service Desk ............................................................................... 5 Step 5: Bind It All Together with Process Control ..................................................... 6 Approaching a Best-Practice Service Desk with Help from the LANDesk Management Platform ............................................................................................. 6 Configuration Control with LANDesk Management Suite ................................... 6 Enterprise-Level Service Desk for Mid-Sized Organizations................................. 7 Enable Complex Audit, Compliance and License Management........................... 8 The Glue that is LANDesk Process Manager .................................................. 8 Extending ITSM from the Desktop to the Data Center .............................................. 9 Simplified Server Procurement ............................................................................ 10 Customized Server Provisioning ......................................................................... 10 Transparent Change and Release Management .................................................. 10 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 11 References .............................................................................................................. 11

Copyright 2007 LANDesk Software Ltd. or its affiliated companies (collectively LANDesk). All rights reserved. LANDesk, Trusted Access and Targeted Multicast are registered trademarks or trademarks of LANDesk in the United States and/or other countries. Avocent is a trademark or registered trademark of Avocent Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names or brands may be claimed as the property of others. This document contains confidential and proprietary information of LANDesk and is provided in connection with the identified LANDesk product(s). No part of this document may be disclosed or copied without the prior written consent of LANDesk. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property rights is granted by this document. Except as provided in LANDesks terms and conditions for the license of such products, LANDesk assumes no liability whatsoever. LANDesk products are not intended for use in medical, life saving, or life sustaining applications. LANDesk does not warrant that this material is error-free, and LANDesk reserves the right to update, correct, or modify this material, including any specifications and product descriptions, at any time, without notice. LSI-0652 10/07 BB/KL

LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Executive Summary
IT service management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework were envisioned to help organizations align IT capabilities with business requirements and provide a systematic approach to planning, developing, implementing, and supporting IT services. This shift from reactive mode to a proactive service orientation is critical for IT departments that seem to be constantly fighting fires. Indeed, ITIL helps establish a consistent level of process across the organization by creating a standard methodology to apply within IT. In doing so, IT becomes more of a business enabler and less of a back-office support organization. If ITIL is intended to help create operational consistency across multiple departments and locations, then what better place to start than with the silos of help desk and IT management? In fact, CIO magazine reports that of the eight books that composed Version 2 of ITIL (Version 3 of ITIL has since been released), most organizations have typically used just twothe Service Support and Service Delivery booksto improve in a tactical way their help desk operations through better incident and problem management, as well as to improve their change-management efforts. 1 The key to bridging these two silos lies in preventing problems from occurring in the first place and, when they do occur, providing rapid response and resolution and enabling as much self-service as possible. CIO magazine also reports that roughly 70 percent of incidents (problem reports) are caused by poorly configured change. A consistent level of process discipline across silos and looking for the root causes of issues helps create the necessary control. 2 The purpose of this white paper is to discuss how mid-size organizations that employ configuration management, service desk, asset management, and process automation technologies on a step-by-step basis can realize the change, configuration and release management improvements required for a true ITSM best-practice service desk.

Introduction
It comes as no surprise that most mid-size companies must rely on a limited number of IT professionals to cover the full gamut of IT responsibilities. Because of the pressure on IT to boost service performance while coping with constrained resources, its a pipe dream to think that IT can simply go out and purchase a solution and, voila, have turnkey service management. Truth be told, flipa-switch ITSM doesnt exist. Even the high-end service management applications that are marketed lock, stock, and barrel by BMC, CA, HP, and IBM require expensive add-on consulting services to implement the applications to customer needs and to tweak and tailor them over time. In many organizations, the help desk has expanded into a service desk, encompassing the functions of problem, change, and configuration management. Peter ONeill of Forrester Research, Inc. says, As processes and procedures for ensuring the continuing health of the IT infrastructure developed, more complex workflows and organizational handoffs were required. Enterprise-class tools to support this service management followed. Common structures and practices added a framework for further refinements. Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure that follows the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations. 3 But what about organizations searching for enterprise capability without the accompanying high-end price tag? Forrester Research Inc.s ONeill says, Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale changes to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on desktop lifecycle management withbut not at the expense ofworkflow, tracking, and reporting tools. 4

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Bringing Affordable, Step-by Step ITSM to the Mid-Market

There exists today a chasm of criticality concerning mid-size organizations resiliency to business and/or IT discontinuity. At one end of the spectrum, small businesses are less dependent on infrastructure and have fewer operational silos. Their IT requirements are typically serviced by point products that do not encompass the bigger picture and cannot scale up. At the other end of the spectrum, Fortune 100 enterprises possess the critical mass and redundancies to withstand significant discontinuities. They are serviced by the high-end, one-size-fits-all service management model. They use the entire solution suite and expensive consulting services, and cannot scale down.

This level of control is absolutely critical, and underpins all other activitiescompliance, security, data integrity, service continuity, service desk/ problem resolution, and capacity planning. If you cant ensure that the device is properly configured, nothing else matters because you dont have enough control to move beyond simple break/fix.

Step 2: Implement a Help Desk

Configuration control, or systems configuration management, is the means to establish knowledge about the operating capabilities and functional readiness of the endpoint device or server, and to control that functional state from a central location. These same tools can then provide the inventory scanning, remote control, and other tools in order to fix specific operational failures. Help desk is a natural outgrowth of configuration controlessentially the face of IT configuration management on the customer side. As such, its the first pragmatic move toward customer-driven service management. This group is concerned with break-fix, realizing a once-and-done call, cutting costs while boosting operational consistency and proving its value through direct metrics. The help desks primary task is to make sure the technology works as expected. This requires the ability to track incidents, assign them to a technician for resolution, and report on successful resolution. Tracking incidents is how IT knows what tasks customers are trying to accomplish and where IT resources need to be focused to meet those needs. This is not yet service management, but it is an absolute prerequisite to service management, and the knowledge and discipline learned in an effective help desk can later be leveraged to address business-specific needs.

Step 1: It All Starts with Endpoint Configuration Management

At its baseline, pragmatic implementation of a best practice service desk requires that an organization have control over the configuration of its endpoint devices. Can IT ensure control over the enterprise environment as a whole with a configuration control / systems management mechanism? Pragmatically, if an organization doesnt have configuration control at its foundation, it has nothing. Endpoint configuration control is necessary to both evaluate your current environment and to bring it into compliance with your internal corporate standardsincluding license compliance, regulatory compliance, patch and security compliance, and service management foundations.

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Step 3: Apply Asset Management

Every organization has a finance group that purchases assets; every organization has users that consume those assets; every organization has an IT group that maintains the operation of those assets. However, most organizations do not effectively bridge asset purchase with asset assignment, or initial costs with ongoing maintenance costsand as such struggle to link IT costs with annual budgets. This is one of the great disconnects between IT and the business. For every IT-related asset, organizations need to know who owns the asset, who is accountable for it (who controls its use), what is the effective cost of ownership and maintenance (and what is the replacement cost), and to whom the asset is assigned (who actually possesses it). Taken to its next step (asset phase 2), IT asset lifecycle management enables both IT professionals and finance organizations to use the same set of data to perform their very different tasks. If IT knows who is responsible for an asset, it can determine how fast (and thus how expensive) maintenance for that asset should be to meet business prioritieswhich enables the business to make decisions on IT priority, staffing, and spend based on real data. If finance knows how much it costs to maintain an asset, it can work with IT to standardize on lower-cost hardware or software. If finance knows to order new hardware as a function of lease expiration, it can work with IT to pull and replace those machines in an orderly, controlled fashion that has minimal impact on all stakeholders. When those machines happen to be servers, this knowledge can make all the difference in the world. This is where technology and the business meet, and where real value begins to be evident. This is where the IT department can expose the high costs of maintenance for certain software, OS platforms, or hardware platforms to drive more intelligent business resource allocation. This is moving beyond traditional break/fix and into service-driven management.

Step 4: Extend to Service Desk

The human discipline within Service Management suggests that while technicians are addressing a particular incident and resolving it, they should also see if similar incidents have occurred elsewhere in the organization and try to determine the underlying causes of those incidents. A trouble ticketing or help desk system essentially just tracks incidents, while a service desk approach groups incidents into problems (infrastructure, patch, security implementation, etc.) and addresses the underlying causes, which are then resolved via configuration management scheduled change and release. If an organization knows what assets it has, how those assets should be configured, how assets relate to each other to enable IT services, and who is accountable for both the maintenance and operation of both the high-level service and the underlying hardware and software, the organization can now move into true service-level management. Once IT services are identified in this manner, the organization can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of both service delivery and service operation. This can then drive plans for service improvement based on clearly understood costs, accountabilities, and requirements. At that point, the organization finally has the foundation elements needed to intelligently plan and implement IT service management and service level improvement as a function of corporate strategy. IT moves from cost-against-product to active partner in developing competitive advantage on a business-operational level. When all is said and done, many organizations dont use their service desk tools either to track, monitor, and manage the services they provide, or to deliver the level of business information their work associates might reasonably expect. How is the service desk operation adding value to the business? Is it correctly aligned with the organizations objectives in the first place? Is the enterprise realizing value from its investment in IT? How is the service desk supporting effective IT governance?

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Why are we struggling with production efficiency? Because changes are pervasive in all aspects of the IT organizations work activity. IT engineers, technicians and managers know firsthand that configuration modifications are a constant, daily occurrence, which have only grown with the rapid pace of change in an increasingly complex business/ technology environment. And where there is change, there is a corresponding level of configuration and release activity. Ronni Colville and Kris Brittain,
IT Operations Three Tenors: Change, Configuration and Release Management, Gartner 25th Annual Data Center Conference, 28 November 1 December 2006, Las Vegas, Nevada

Approaching a Best-Practice Service Desk with Help from the LANDesk Management Platform
IT service management fits comfortably in the LANDesk management platform because managing IT services is achieved through the very capabilities that LANDesk solutions deliver so wellconfiguration control, structured asset repository, service desk, and disciplined change management. LANDesk addresses what Gartner terms the three tenors of ITSMchange, configuration and release managementfrom start to finish, all from a single vendor. (While the major framework suppliers, such as BMC and CA, do this as well, LANDesk is the only mid-market vendor offering these capabilities.) LANDesks solution doesnt lock a customer into a particular vendor. It enables organizations to implement ITSM one step at a time while leveraging existing tools and practices, rather than requiring a radical, comprehensive change. Configuration Control with LANDesk Management Suite As a configuration control tool, LANDesk Management Suite offers remote control and problem resolution, software license monitoring, software distribution, OS deployment and profile migration, inventory management, and support for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Inventory management capabilities for example let you discover networked computing devices, automatically maintain detailed hardware and software inventories, gather and track custom data fields, monitor software usage to reduce licensing costs and maintain compliance, plan upgrades and maintenance and quickly respond to audits. And a unified asset repository brings it all together, letting you turn raw data into pure business intelligence.

Step 5: Bind It All Together with Process Control

Adding a layer of automated process control is what pulls all the elements together. It brings a consistent, single driving process that crosses silos, unifies the functionality, and provides cost realization, consistency, and speed to service. For example, when IT receives a service request to add some software, a process initiates, checking the asset repository to determine if a license exists. Once thats confirmed, the process fires off a task to the configuration team or executes directly within the systems management application itself to install that particular software. Should a license not exist, the process kicks off a business organization purchase of a new piece of software. Service desk uses the tools, applies human intelligence to make decisions, applies a process to ensure that all data is correctly analyzed and updated, and that approvals are automated in order to make the parts work together more cohesively and effectively to boost efficiency. This is the power of process. It glues the pieces together to create consistency across the foundation tools. It builds the process-controlled bridges between configuration control and service desk, between asset control and service desk, and between asset repository and configuration control.

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Enterprise-Level Service Desk for Mid-Sized Organizations LANDesk Service Desk delivers enterprise-level consolidated service desk capabilities without requiring a large enterprise budget, training or knowledge level. The solution is scalable to grow with service needs, and unlike other service desk solutions, it includes comprehensive capabilities that enable organizations to implement ITIL version 2 and 3 and ITSM best practices. With LANDesk Management Suite integration, service desk teams access the key functions needed to solve users issues and make work life easier for everyone, including inventory, remote control, chat, file transfer, remote execute and reboot capabilities. LANDesk inventory data, accessible directly from the Service Desk

console, gives technicians complete information about both hardware and software. Theyre empowered to establish and maintain enforceable policy-driven service management and access comprehensive audit tracking and reporting capabilitiesmaking it easier and less costly to remediate vulnerabilities, track transaction histories and eliminate the risk of ongoing failures. The fully configurable LANDesk Service desk user interface ensures that every type of servicefrom a simple incident, problem or service request to any other definable sequence of events followed by a service teamis managed appropriately and that the right action is completed by the right person at the right time.

LANDesk Service Desk includes built-in processes for ITIL Service Desk, Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management and Service Level Management, so you can quickly and efficiently manage the life cycle of the services IT provides and create true business value

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Enable Complex Audit, Compliance and License Management An effective service desk is able to look at both the configuration management system and the asset repository to gather the information necessary to prioritize and deliver the agreed upon levels of service from the service desk. LANDesk asset management is a combination of asset repository, process automation, and computing device inventory and monitoring tools designed to give asset administrators insight into the current assignment, configuration and operational state of IT and related assets. This capability includes not only network-discoverable assets like computers and software, but related non-discoverable assets such as invoices, contracts, peripheral devices, and more. Being able to track device state, relationship, ownership, assignment and accountability form the simple organizational foundations of being able to manage compliance and operational integrity. LANDesk Asset Manager functions as an extensible asset repository capable of holding or referencing any kind of data relating to an individual asset or class of assets. This supports customers in aggregating and tracking well-defined data points as part of a well-planned asset management strategy. It also interacts directly with LANDesk Management Suite to enable key asset state, software license and current configuration data to be derived directly from near-real-time device scanning on managed computers. This enables meaningful compliance analysis and internal audit support, as well as providing insight into current operational status.

The Glue that is LANDesk Process Manager As mentioned earlier, adding a layer of automated process control is what brings all the elements of a best-practice service desk together. This layer of control enables organizations to implement ITIL-compliant process workflows in an effort to improve IT and business efficiencies. Forrester Research, Inc.s Peter ONeill says, The process of managing change to the infrastructure is compounded by size, complexity, business impact, and new regulatory requirements. Modeling such workflows with the proper approval and change controls requires industrial-strength process and workflow management tools that allow secure, auditable, and controlled processes. 5 LANDesk Process Manager lets users create consistent, predictable, automated IT workflows to streamline redundant maintenance tasks to save time, labor, and money. Many of the automated tasks customers have established within their LANDesk Management Suite, LANDesk Security Suite, and LANDesk Server Manager can integrate seamlessly into workflows designed using LANDesk Process Manager. In addition, LANDesk Asset Manager can be used with LANDesk Process Manager to enable access toand manipulation ofasset data according to well defined, repeatable processes that reflect corporate goals and policies. Organizations can create focused micro-applications that implement and enforce corporate policies for all phases of IT asset management, from initial procurement to internal assignment and eventual disposal. LANDesk Process Manager provides the glue, the power, the intelligent coordination across all of these functions to realize pragmatic service management and control of all interrelated processes across the enterprise.

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

The Process Designer in LANDesk Process Manager is used for modeling and visualizing complex processes. It also serves as the workflow execution engine. With only minimal IT involvement, the straightforward interface and elements like drag and drop enable any process owner to design, model, document, and optimize their IT processes. Such processes can be designed and deployed in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.

Extending ITSM from the Desktop to the Data Center

While its true that the data center has evolved from a client/server approach to the Web computing model, solutions for provisioning, change, and configuration management have lagged behind. Nevertheless, there is a genuine need for data center automation solutions to help IT organizations more efficiently provision, configure, and manage todays sophisticated data center environment. For example, the process of procuring, provisioning, and updating a new server can be time-consuming and complex, and may extend over several months for some enterprises. Simply securing the necessary budget approvals to purchase a server can be a major roadblock on its own, without even considering potential delays in ordering and receiving the server. After a new server arrives, IT administrators must prepare and provision it for deployment.

Manual provisioning can be time-consuming and subject to human error, often relying on individual knowledge or a lengthy series of paper checklists to ensure that each step is carried out correctly. Automated image-based processes can be well suited for desktop deployments, but they often lack the flexibility and control necessary for servers, requiring administrators to make manual adjustments to each configuration. In both cases, the inherent lack of control, repeatability, and reliability can significantly extend the time it takes to finally bring a server online. LANDesk Process Manager and LANDesk Server Manager are designed to streamline and automate these types of processes, and integrating these two applications into enterprise workflows allows administrators to automate many procurement, provisioning, and change and release management tasks, helping create repeatable, reliable IT processes.

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Simplified Server Procurement The first step towards extending ITSM from the desktop to the data center is to create an efficient and repeatable process for server procurement. LANDesk Process Manager is designed to simplify this type of task. Administrators can use LANDesk Process Manager to define a preferred hardware platform for their specific environment. Then, when a department needs a new server, it can easily choose one from the approved list and initiate an internal order. Based on the enterprises defined processes, LANDesk Process Manager can automatically carry out the necessary tasks to obtain approvals, order the server from the vendor, and notify the appropriate IT staff members when the server arrives. It can also provide status updates and automatic notifications throughout the process to allow IT staff to prepare before the server arrives. The business process management engine in LANDesk Process Manager orchestrates, automates, and monitors procurement processes, including the validation, escalation, and management of procurement activities. Customized Server Provisioning What makes provisioning with LANDesk software so powerful is the integration between the processes executed by LANDesk Process Manager and the customized provisioning capabilities of LANDesk Server Manager. LANDesk Server Manager eases server provisioning, enabling IT staff to configure servers in a repeatable, reliable way once the servers have arrived. This solution can schedule hardware configuration tasks, install the appropriate OS and applications, set the security policies, and then store the history of these actions to provide a configuration record for each server. Moreover, IT staff can easily reuse the same process on the next server they deploy or on duplicate hardware after rebuilding a server. Provisioning with LANDesk Server Manager enables IT staff to use a single provisioning task to install and configure servers, from OS installation to application deployment, patching, and configuration. The solution also allows staff to split a particular provisioning task into easy-to-manage segments, the same way they would when setting up a system manually. Segments might include:
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Designing and testing system configurations Deploying an OS to one system or a group of systems Performing post-OS tasks, such as installing applications, updating virus definitions, and applying OS patches Verifying that the installation was successful, perhaps by running sample test applications

Transparent Change and Release Management In addition to simplifying server provisioning, LANDesk Server Manager helps administrators handle the difficulties associated with change and release management. The integration between LANDesk Process Manager and LANDesk Server Manager also offers multiple advantages when creating and managing processes that deal with incident management, configuration management, release management, security management, and IT service continuity, helping administrators and other process owners:
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Minimize the risk of failed or bad changes and potential service disruptions caused by changes, and prevent unauthorized changes Authorize and allocate resources to make changes, and ensure changes are implemented cost-effectively Implement enterprise-wide changes automatically and efficiently, without enterprise-wide impact Identify, record, and classify incidents and quickly restore affected service levels to maintain high levels of availability Automate the management, identification, control, and maintenance of existing configurations, replacingmanual operations with rapid, efficient, and scalable automated processesfor example, by reusing a template to bring a particular server back to a known state

Planning and assessing needs Creating reusable building-block tasks for common operations

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LANDesk White Paper | Achieving a Best-Practice Service Desk from Desktop to Data Center

Conclusion
For IT organizations that thought automated ITSM best practices were too complex and expensive for them, the LANDesk portfolio proves that even moderate sized organizations with limited in-house expertise can now begin to embrace best practices ITSM and implement sophisticated, end-toend workflow automation. Customers that are willing to adopt out-of-thebox best practices and implement standardized workflows using these types of tools should find themselves saving money and significantly improving end-user satisfaction levels. Mary Johnston Turner,
LANDesk delivers affordable and effective ITSM, Ovum Summit, 25 January 2007

Without question, IT service management best practices help organizations simplify the interface between IT and business, allowing the two to align and converge like never before. In order for IT departments to shift from a reactive, firefighting mode to a proactive service approach, it is vital that they adopt an IT service management orientation and establish a consistent level of process across silos. In doing so, they become more of a business enabler from desktop to data center and less of a back-office support organization. The solutions briefly described in this white paper that compose the LANDesk service management platform help enable mid-size and smaller organizations to create operational consistency across multiple departments and locations, including the traditionally siloed departments of service desk and IT management. LANDesk helps organizations employ systems and configuration management solutions, service desk, asset management, and process automation step by step in order to cost-effectively realize the change, configuration and release management capabilities required for a true ITSM best-practice service desk. For more information on LANDesk products, you are welcome to visit www.landesk.com, send an email to sales@landesk.com, or call:
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1-800-982-2130 in the U.S. +44 (0) 845 230 5580 in Europe 1-801-208-1785 for Asia-Pacific offices

References
1 Galen Gruman, ITIL Goes Strategic, CIO Magazine, April 1, 2007, p. 25 2 Ibid. 3 Peter ONeill, The Service Desk Software Market: Customer Relationship Management Matures In IT Organizations, July 25, 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

Visit www.landesk.com for more information.

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