HELP DESK VS. SERVICE DESK

The debate on the definition of a service desk versus a help desk has been ongoing, and companies find themselves asking questions around IT desk nomenclature, strategies and scalability. Although determining the difference between terms “help desk” and “service desk” seems like a crucial first step, what might be even more important is considering the type of service desk you want to be.

Before we explain why this is important, let’s clear up some of the confusion surrounding the terms “help desk” and “service desk.” In short, think of the service desk as an ecosystem and the help desk as a piece of that ecosystem (a square is a rhombus, right?). A help desk may consist of a smaller team with a primary objective to resolve specific incidents (a broken printer, for example), software and hardware glitches, and ticket management–all of which service desks do, too. Help desks are point solutions and typically reactive.

A service desk, however, is more business-centric and built on core ITIL principles and the five stages of the service lifecycle, which are:

1. Service Strategy: design, develop, and implement strategy and business goals of ITSM
2. Service Design: create design and develop processes that support service strategies
3. Service Transition: transition services from development to operation
4. Service Operation: review and deliver services
5. Continual Service Improvement: review, assess and improve strategies to provide better service

This means service desks often tackle strategic business needs, provide service request solutions and a knowledge base to end users, and oversee incident and change management and IT processes and functions.

Some features commonly found within a Help Desk software typically include:

• Ticket Routing and Management
• Limited Automation
• Asset Management

Some features commonly found within a Service Desk software typically include:

• Change and Release Management
• Self-Service Portals
• Knowledge Base

WHY IT MATTERS

The reason it’s important to determine the kind of service desk you want to be is because you should invest in a system you can grow into, not out of.

Some smaller companies implement a help desk SaaS solution that focuses only on being IT-centric instead of IT service-centric, which may be all they need.

But other companies often outgrow the platform’s limitations and soon after look to upgrade, which can be time-consuming, expensive and require additional resources and training than originally planned for. And, given that service management solutions aren’t just for IT departments anymore, the need to expand your ITSM solution is common.

THE (IT) SOLUTION

To avoid outgrowing your software solution, consider the capabilities of the platform from the start. Does it offer typical help desk features as well as service desk management, such as a self-service portal, a knowledge base and automation? Does it follow ITIL processes? Be diligent in your research of your future service platform to ensure it–and your business–can succeed.

At Vivantio, we develop, deliver and support service management software focused on improving your teams’ customer support levels because we believe that providing excellent customer service is the core of any organization, including ours.

We took some time during the Service Desk and IT Support Conference in London to explain how Vivantio’s unique business model unlocks the very best customer service possible.

What sets Vivantio apart is our focus on the customer and our genuine care to help them create opportunities to streamline their service operations and increase productivity and accelerate response times to all customers. 

Discover for yourself with a free 15 minute consult/demo today. 

WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT

London’s 2019 Service Desk & IT Support Show is now over and the Vivantio team has met with over 300 people to demo the latest features in FLEX. During the show, we spoke with customers and industry experts to hear the big topics on everyone’s mind this year. Here’s what we heard.

SELECTING THE BEST ITSM TOOL

Choosing the best ITSM software for your company can seem challenging. With several options and configurations on the market, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. What companies truly need to consider are their business goals, then assess potential costs and options such as SaaS vs on-premise delivery, the software’s hosting platform partner, security standards and certificates, and integration abilities. Attendees learned the do’s and don’ts of the ITSM selection process at the “How to avoid common pitfalls: a guide to ITSM tool election” seminar by Pink Elephant, who we’ve partnered with in the past to discuss ITSM strategies.

STAYING AHEAD OF THE CURVE

Is IT still relevant? We think so. But thanks to ever-evolving technology and customer demands, IT departments feel they are fighting to stay relevant, which was a hot topic in the “Fighting for relevance” seminar by Virtual Clarity. We’ve found that to provide top-of-the-line service, IT service teams will need to create strong customer connections, stay on top of technological innovation, deliver even better (and faster) service, continue to ensure quality processes, and adhere to security protocols–which leads us to the question of…

STREAMLINING THE PROCESS

…How to best streamline service management. Because an organization is greater than the sum of its parts, several companies search for scalable ITSM software that can serve multiple departments. By using custom-built workflows, conditional custom fields and forms, and flexible self-service portals, a company can meet the demands of both internal and external customers. Employee training is also crucial. SkillsTx covered how to identify what skills an IT team will need to keep up with customer demands in the panel discussion, “What skills do you have and what do you need?”

OUR SOLUTION

We provide a solution to some of these challenges. With your goal of improving service teams in mind, we’re creating software that is at the forefront of the industry. Vivantio is a centralised hub for all your service needs, enabling users to provide outstanding service management without being cost- or growth-restrictive. Let us show you.

BETTER AUTOMATION TOOLS FOR ALL.

At Vivantio, we constantly interact with teams who have mature service strategies but are searching for better ways to notify stakeholders of their incoming tasks, automate standard processes and define KPIs to adequately benchmark team performance.

To combat common process slowdowns, we have designed the Vivantio visual workflow process tool to streamline tasks and approvals for your standard workflow processes. Let’s discuss how the tool functions and then offer a few examples of applicable processes.

WHAT IS THE VISUAL WORKFLOW TOOL?

Vivantio’s Visual Workflow Tool is a flowchart builder that contains conditional statements to determine the order that tasks are assigned to decision-makers in your workflow process. Your processes can adapt based on previous actions. Therefore, our tool is designed to enforce different workflows depending on task decisions. An example of a conditional workflow includes a product return process that triggers separate tasks depending on the return reason.

Let’s look at how the Visual Workflow Tool address various company operation workflows.

EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING WORKFLOW

A disorganized and incomplete employee onboarding workflow can put an organization at risk for non-compliance or improper preparation. As with all workflows, the on-boarding process requires input between different stakeholders, requiring seamless transitions between each workflow stage.

Vivantio’s Visual Workflow Tool ensures that notifications, approvals and forms are displayed at the correct time and filled out by the proper person, so time-consuming processes such as manual emails, phone calls, and document tracking are completely automated.

Conditional task assignment in onboarding workflows may be used to eliminate unnecessary steps if an employee is a re-hire versus a new hire. If the individual is a new hire, the workflow may assign a task to them to fill out an I9 form and HR may initiate a background check based on the information filled out by the new hire. A re-hire instead may bypass this process entirely and automatically assign a task to the hiring manager to send an offer letter and schedule the starting date. Accepting the offer letter may then trigger additional processes such as assigning tasks to IT for hardware and software allocation.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT WORKFLOW

A successful change management workflow requires capturing details on the affected systems, measuring the risks involved, and managing approvals throughout the process.

The challenge with managing changes is efficiently planning, testing, implementing and then analyzing your KPIs to determine if the change was successful. These processes must occur without impeding normal business operations, hence the benefit of automatic approvals and conditional triggers. Triggering separate workflow processes depending on whether a change is pre-approved, normal or an emergency can help place focus on changes that have a larger impact on the organization.

Pre-approved processes, such as a planned asset upgrade, may trigger a single change manager approval. This prevents operational slow down with a lengthy review process. Scheduled reporting on KPIs associated with the change can be delivered to the change manager to determine if the change is successful.

CAPITAL EXPENDITURE WORKFLOW

Teams with improper evaluation and tracking protocols to process capital expenditure requests are open to budget risks. With Vivantio’s Visual Workflow Tool, you can create appropriate workflows to ensure the correct departments have input on reviewing and processing these requests.

An example process involves an IT employee filling out a form online to request funding for a new help desk solution. An approval notification is then sent to the requester’s manager, which, when approved, sends a secondary approval request to the CFO if the project exceeds a defined price threshold. After the CFO approves the purchase, the project details are delivered to the purchasing department to place an order. The contract may then be managed within your assets database for automated notifications when nearing license renewal.

REPORTING WORKFLOW

While streamlining workflows can rapidly improve a team’s output and success, a powerful reporting tool is essential for tracking service trends for continual improvements. Task completion time is tracked in Vivantio, which provides a useful metric in determining your bottlenecks.

Identifying your service pain points is the first stage in reallocating resources for improved service. Large organizations often track important dates within Vivantio, so scheduled reports can be sent to inform managers of start/finish and deliverable dates for changes and projects.

CONCLUSION

We hope you found this article useful in getting your workflows off the ground in our Visual Workflow Tool. Vivantio’s in-house implementation and support teams consist of ITIL-trained professionals who both have extensive knowledge with optimizing workflows and using the Vivantio platform to leverage the workflow tool to automate your processes. If you need more personal help with a specific workflow, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us directly.

CAN VIVANTIO BE USED AS AN ALM TOOL?

The answer is yes. Vivantio is flexible enough to be configured to model your development processes, whether you’re using Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, Spiral, or some combination of these. The combination of multiple ticket areas, workflow, asset, and knowledge management gives you almost everything you need.

WHAT CAN’T VIVANTIO DO?

There’s still a couple of things Vivantio can’t do. Some examples are:

• Source control
• Software development

SHOULD I USE VIVANTIO FOR ALM?

Probably not, at least not just Vivantio. Using it with a combination of tools like Team Foundation Server would be a more optimal solution.

That being said, there is definitely a place for Vivantio in your ALM activities. It is very unlikely your developers will want to share their ALM software suite with the support team. However, there is a good chance that Vivantio can help a support team supplement their development team’s efforts.

WHAT IS THE REPORT CATALOG?

All Vivantio customers receive the same standard out-of-the-box reports when they start out with Vivantio. However, every customer has different requirements for reporting in Vivantio, and the out-of-the-box reports are meant as a starting point, only. During your implementation, your Implementation Consultant will work with you to assess your reporting requirements and either build reports for you or empower you to build your own reports using the Vivantio Report Builder.

During the nearly 15 years our implementation team have been going through that process, we’ve seen many different reporting requirements from a lot of different customers. Some are pretty unique. Others have made us think: “Wow, we need to make this available to everyone!” While we don’t want to fill up every customer system with hundreds of reports that aren’t relevant, we did want to find a way to share these reports with all our customers.

Hence the introduction of the Vivantio Report Catalog: a “marketplace” of Reports that you can browse through. If you find a report you like, you can import it into your Vivantio instance, where you can then customize it using the Vivantio Report Builder.

HOW DO I USE THE REPORT CATALOG?

Once the Report Catalog is enabled in your system, you need to choose which Roles have access to it. This is done under:

Admin » Reporting » Reports » Access Control

On that screen, when editing a Role, you can grant the Role the “View Report Catalog” permission. Having enabled that for a Role, when a member of that Role is logged in, they will see the Report Catalog link under the Reports section of the left menu. Clicking that link will open the Report Catalog in a new window, allowing you to browse the selection of available reports, preview them, and then import them into your Vivantio instance. After importing a report, it’s available within Vivantio (and the Vivantio Report Builder) like any other report. So, you can customize it, add branding, change the data, whatever you need!

CAN I PUT MY REPORTS INTO THE REPORT CATALOG FOR OTHER VIVANTIO CUSTOMERS TO SEE?

We won’t be making this available by default. If you have a report that you’re particularly proud of or think other customers would find useful, please contact our support team and let them know. We will then review and contact you with a time to chat and see if we can include it.

LEARN HOW VIVANTIO’S INTEGRATION CAPABILITIES REALLY COMPARE.

When considering possible ITSM tools, one key element to consider is how well each product will integrate with your available resources to provide a seamless IT organization. With so many options out there, it can be difficult to determine what will work best for your team. In order to see how our product compares, Vivantio participated in a SIAM group test that was run by The ITSM Review. The ITSM Review is an IT community that focuses on sharing knowledge about various tools out there that are available to professionals. But, what is a SIAM group test exactly? Let’s explain.

WHAT IS A SIAM GROUP TEST?

SIAM (service integration and management) is a framework for managing multiple suppliers of IT services and integrating them to provide a single, business-facing IT organization.

In other words, SIAM is all about joining all of your IT tools – email, systems monitoring, development tracking, notification services, etc. – into one unified hub, saving your service team time and money while never losing out on important data.

THE RESULTS ARE IN

Vivantio took part in the Group Test and garnered some high praise.

“What really impressed me about Vivantio was their dedication to making life easier for beleaguered Ops and Supplier Managers,” wrote Vawns Murphy, senior ITSM analyst for ITSM Review parent Enterprise Opinions and author of the study. “The use of technology to not only support integration but also automate pre-defined responses to ticket event, really makes this a strong contender in the tools universe.”

“The Vivantio ethos is to deliver flexible, reliable, trusted ITSM software to empower the delivery of service excellence to the customer organisation. From the product demonstration, this ethos was clear to see as the flexibility of the product spans interfaces from everything; from Microsoft to Google,” Murphy goes on to write.

For the full results of the SIAM Group Test, visit The ITSM Review.

TECH EXPERTS AT PC MAG TAKE NOTE OF VIVANTIO'S INTEGRATION CAPABILITIES.

If you’re familiar with our platform, you already know that flexibility is a big theme for Vivantio. This theme ties directly into our platform’s approach to integrations. The Vivantio Platform is a workhorse in IT service management in its own right. But, the typical service team may utilize dozens of different tools in day-to-day operations, making it imperative that the Platform work in-sync with all the pieces in your service ecosystem.

LEARN DIRECTLY FROM THE EXPERTS AT PCMAG

PC Magazine published a great piece on taking the Vivantio Platform’s functionality to the next level by integrating with key outside tools.

Read the full story here: 4 Integrations for a More Powerful Vivantio Experience.

WHEN SHOULD I USE THE VIVANTIO API?

We’d encourage the use of Webhooks and Web Methods wherever possible for a number of reasons such as:

• You don’t need to write any code.
• They’re hosted within Vivantio so don’t need to be deployed separately.

But there are a number of situations where the API is the better or only choice. Let’s explain with two most common instances: Integrating with Legacy Systems and Developing Custom Applications.

HOW TO APPROACH INTEGRATION METHODS

When looking to integrate Vivantio with other platforms, it’s important to understand the different methods available to you. We have many avenues of approach and they each offer different pros and cons.

We’ve divided your integration methods into five distinct areas:

VIVANTIO INTEGRATION SERVICES

The Vivantio Integration Services Component (ISC) provides a growing number of modules to allow your team to connect with other systems via a built-in GUI.

As of this posting, those systems include:

• Active Directory
• SQL

You can also schedule data exports such as reporting via the ISC.

DIRECT FIRST CLASS INTEGRATIONS

Over time, due to their popularity with our customers, we have developed a number of direct integrations. These will work out-of-the-box.

As of the time of this post, these include:

• JIRA
• TFS

WEBHOOKS AND WEB METHODS

In order to offer our customers a method to configure interactions without code, we’ve set up Webhooks and Web Methods in Vivantio. With this method, you can set up outgoing HTTP notifications or allow systems to make simple HTTP requests within Vivantio. This offers great flexibility for use with systems that utilize this functionality.

THE VIVANTIO API

Vivantio is built “API first”. What this means is that we have an extensive API that your development team can use to query, update, and create data. This method offers the most possible flexibility. You can find our (work-in-progress) API documentation here.

BESPOKE DEVELOPMENT

It should be noted that, if none of the above options fit with your needs, we are always welcome to explore bespoke development of integrations for our customers. If you contact our support team, we are happy to arrange for a member of our professional services or product team to discuss your requirements in more detail and work out a solution that works for you.