SaaS Insights, Software, Customer Service and Help Desk Best Practices | Giva - Insights For CIOs & IT Directors

An ITIL Compliant SaaS Hosted IT Change Management Software Process

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:19:13 -0700

The follow are the high level steps where a good SaaS hosted change management software application will assist in the change process workflow:

Step 1: Request for Change (RFC) Submission: Users and Customers submit requests into the SaaS hosted change management software. Requirements include the reason for change, customers affected, estimated cost, impact on existing services and other relevant factors. Documents can be attached to the RFC such as business and project plans and ROI analysis.

· Step 2: Change Manager Acceptance: The Change Manager is notified by the SaaS hosted change management software of a new RFC.

o Change Acceptance: This means the actual receipt, recording and documentation of the RFC.

o Filter RFC: The Change Manager filters out inappropriate requests, and informs the RFC initiator of the acceptance or rejection and the reason.

Step 3: Establish Priority:
Urgent Priority: The Change Manager may classify the initial priority as Urgent. The SaaS hosted change management software automatically notifies CAB or CAB/EC of an urgent meeting. If the CAB approves the change, then the Change Manager updates the change record and implements the urgent change process.
Priority: The Change Manager decides the category (initial impact/resource estimate) and/or use of standard (minor) change model.
Step 4: Classification

Minor Change: The Change Manager has the authority to approve or reject a minor change. The Change Manager schedules the change based on resources and other changes scheduled in the change management software. This action automatically notifies the CAB.
Significant Change: If the Change Manager assigns the priority as “Significant”, then the SaaS hosted change management software automatically circulates the RFC to CAB members. CAB members then confirm impact/resources estimate and priority, approve/reject changes and schedule changes.
Major Change: If the Change Manager assigns the priority as “Major”, then the SaaS hosted change management software automatically circulates the RFC to CAB members AND to senior management/board level. CAB and senior management approves/reject changes on the grounds of financial, technical or business reasons. Next, the change is scheduled.

Step 5: Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC): This is a schedule that contains details of all the Changes approved for implementation and their proposed implementation dates. Once approved, the responsible Service Group communicates to Users and Customers any planned or additional downtime arising from implementing the Changes.
Step 6: Change Builder Input: Approved changes have a responsible builder party that builds the change in the development environment, creates the back out and testing plans. The Change builder updates the RFC with all this information.
Step 7: Change Implemented Documentation: The RFC is updated after the change is successful implemented with actual change data, costs, time to implement and realized benefits. Also, the RFC is updated if the change did not work. The update includes what went wrong, impact on customers and the business, lessons learned and recommendations to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
Step 8: Change Closed: The Change Manager closes the RFC. He verifies that the record has all the required information entered according to the established change processes.

· Step 9: Reporting Metrics: The Change Management process' key metrics include the following:
1. Cost and benefit information.
2. The source of and reasons for change. For example, corrective vs. innovative, business vs. technical.
3. Number of successful or unsuccessful changes. For example, how many changes had to be backed-out and how many problems arose.
4. Status metrics. For example, the number of changes in progress or the number of new changes in backlog.

Throughout the change process, SaaS hosted change management software has all the current information for all of IT. However, more specifically it has this information available for the help desk. When anything out of the ordinary comes to the help desk, a simple click of the SaaS hosted change management software hyperlink will allow a User to access all recent changes. Valuable time is not required for diagnosing an issue that is the result of a change. If necessary, the help desk can create a ticket with a cause code of “Change” and immediately assign it to the responsible change implementation person.

Giva eChangeManager is integrated with Giva eHelpDesk. There is also a standalone edition of Giva eChangeManager. This can be integrated with other problem management systems.

For more information see http://www.givainc.com/change-management-software/index.htm

Change Management Process Implementation Suggestions

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:07:49 -0700

Change Management is first and foremost a process. It is a process involving all of IT. It must have the highest management support. The following are roles and responsibilities that need to be in place before embarking on a Change Management process. These must be in place before a change management process can be successfully implemented. Consider SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) to make getting up and running faster, easier and less expensive.

Change Manager
- Ensures the Change Process Is Followed
- Approves Low Risk Changes
- Issues Future Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC)
- Coordinates Change Building
- Reviews All Implemented Changes
- Closes Change Records
- Produces Management Reports
Change Advisory Board (CAB)
- Reviews All Submitted Request for Changes (RFC)
- Attends Relevant CAB or CAB/EC Meetings
- Advises the Change Manger
Emergency Committee (EC) (Subset of the CAB)

Makes Decisions on Urgent Changes

Please see http://www.givainc.com/change-management-software/index.htm for more information.

Benefits of SaaS Hosted Change Management

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:01:43 -0700

Benefits of Change Management

Better alignment of IT services to actual business needs
Increased visibility and communication of changes to both business and service support staff
Reduced negative impact of change on IT services by improving the assessment of business and technical risk
Improved assessment of the cost of proposed Changes before they are incurred
Improved Problem, Supplier, and Availability Management through the use of valuable management information relating to Changes
Improved productivity of Users through less disruption and higher quality services
Improved productivity of key IT personnel due to reduced repair of Changes
Greater ability to absorb a large volume of Changes

Benefits of SaaS Hosted Approach to Change Management:

See http://www.givainc.com/change-management-software/index.htm for more information

Objective of Change Management Software

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:57:12 -0700

The objective of Change Management is to help maximize the benefits of making changes to the IT infrastructure while minimizing the risks involved in making those changes.

The implementation of a Change Management process represents a major milestone for an IT organization on the road to stabilizing its IT infrastructure. It is probably the most difficult process to establish because it requires the support of everyone involved in IT provisioning and support.

The Gartner Group published a report several years ago that stated that 87% of the calls into a typical company's Help Desk were the result of change-related failures. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the successful implementation of the Change Management process should lead to significant improvements in the overall stability and quality of IT services.

The Change Management process does not guarantee that changes to the IT infrastructure will not cause problems, but it reduces the probability.

See http://www.givainc.com/change-management-software/index.htm for more information

Law Firm IT Help Desk Upgrade & Software Maintenance

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:16:08 -0700

Giva SaaS eliminates IT help desk upgrades & software maintenance

Giva has a special industry focus on law firms. You have a clear mandate from the Partners, "Cut firm operating costs, now!"

Is the cost of annual software maintenance, consultants and upgrade fees for your current IT help desk application too high?

With Giva, law firm customers on average experienced a:

45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than previous annual software maintenance)
90% decrease in implementation time and cost
Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Read about how we lowered costs for these law firms:

Click for a 2 minute video and TCO Analysis

Reactive to Strategic...The Help Desk and Customer Service Journey

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:40:44 -0700

Help desks and customer service organizations that have successfully journeyed from being reactive to being strategic generally follow a similar path. Often the steps include the following:

> Develop a call reduction strategy. The most common approach to call reduction is root-cause analysis; a process designed to eliminate the source of key problems. Root-cause analysis, which ought to be undertaken monthly, categorizes calls by type and technology and then discovers common causes for those calls. Next it acts to diminish the number of future calls by refining user training or the development of new online help screens. For example, one help desk found that new employees called the help desk an average of four times per month, while those who had worked at the company for a year or more averaged only one call per month. By providing a half-hour IT orientation to all new employees, the help desk reduced call volume from new users by 60 percent. But don't overlook the obvious. Another help desk reduced incoming calls by nearly 5 percent just by informing callers how their problems had been solved. The next time users encountered the same problem, they were able to solve it without the help desk.

> Free agents to work on call abatement projects. Since abatement projects are the heavy-lifting task of call desk centers, they need to be undertaken well out of earshot of ringing phones. The most common excuse for agents being unavailable for planning is they are trapped in 911 mode. To release agents for call abatement, try to assign additional resources to staffing on the phones or else be prepared for a short-term increase in the call volume can be reduced. Contractors can be particularly useful as a stopgap resource for answering telephones while regular agents focus on call reduction efforts.

See the following link for a great White Paper on the topic:

http://www.givainc.com/white-papers/index.htm

Needs Assessment Help Desk and Customer Service Saas

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:35:53 -0700

A lot of software licenses are not used and become "Shelfware" because the needs of the purchaser changed or the software never delivered what the purchaser expected. Often, the purchaser thinks that they know what they need as far as feature requirements, but after implementation they can not get their employees or customers engaged to use the application. Also, in time their needs change and the product the bought has not evolved to meet their changing needs.

In summary, there is a lot of risk in purchasing software. Consider if the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model may help your organization minimize risk and decrease the lifetime TCO of an application.

Request a Free Needs Assessment your Help Desk or Customer Service Software Requirements

Web Help Desk Software & Customer Service Software- Total Cost of Ownership

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:30:58 -0700

Giva provides some valuable tools to help you better understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of owning software applications and comparing it to the SaaS approach.

The purchase price of software licenses and annual maintenance fees you pay a vendor are a very small component of the true TCO.

Hardware, databases and related purchases are important to consider, but they are not as large as the actual labor required to manage and maintain the application and the infrastructure. Gartner Group estimates some of these costs and Giva will provide them to you in an Excel spreadsheet if you request a TCO analysis.

Labor is an enormous component that is always over looked and universally underestimated due to human bias. It's often hard for IT people to admit that an outside vendor can do a better job and be more cost effective. The fact is that SaaS vendors have enormous scale and efficiencies of building, managing, maintaining and hosting an application for 100,000s of users vs. your company trying to do the same for your IT department which is of course many many orders of magnitude smaller.

When your CIO says, "we have plenty of IT people to do all this work", respond by saying, "Let's look at your list of IT projects for the last 12 month...are you ahead or behind schedule?" Invariably, you will find that they are significantly behind schedule on many key revenue impact projects because the IT dept is spending a lot of time just to keep the infrastructure up and running instead of focusing on strategic projects that impact/generate revenue to the company. As you well know, a help desk/customer service organization does not generate revenue for a company.

Request a Free TCO Comparing Your Help Desk or Customer Service Software vs. Giva

Healthcare & Hospital IT Help Desk Upgrade & Software Maintenance

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:13:46 -0700

Giva SaaS eliminates IT help desk upgrades & software maintenance

Giva has a special industry focus on healthcare and hospitals.

You have a clear mandate to reduce IT help desk operating costs. Is the cost of annual software maintenance, consultants and upgrade fees for your current IT help desk application too high?

With Giva, healthcare and hospital customers on average experienced a:

45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than previous annual software maintenance)
90% decrease in implementation time and cost
Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Giva Service Management Suite™		Traditional Client/Server Help Desk Software
Customers experienced a 45% decrease in annual software maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than annual software maintenance cost)	vs.	Purchase licenses, servers, software and add-on modules. Also, significant FTE headcount and expensive consultants required for ongoing "care and feeding"
Coded from the ground-up with a Web-native architecture and built in 1999 for the Internet	vs.	Architected before the Internet-client/server
Web 2.0 Intuitive Design—Agents can learn in just 1 hour	vs.	Client/server interface
Implementation in just 1 week	vs.	Implementation often measured in months and quarters
Architecture built on ITIL from our first line of code-modules seamlessly integrated	vs.	Legacy applications that evolved with add-ons
Quarterly enhancements are seamless with Giva Software-as-Service (SaaS)	vs.	With traditional software, upgrades will distract your business, cost significant fees, require FTE headcount and expensive consultants

Click for a TCO or ROI Analysis

Click to watch a 2 minute video of Giva eHelpDesk

BMC® Service Desk Express Suite Upgrade & Software Maintenance

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:12:22 -0700

Eliminate Service Desk Express upgrades & software maintenance with Giva SaaS

Is the cost of annual software maintenance, consultants and upgrade fees for BMC Service Desk Express too high?

BMC Service Desk Express Suite customers face a resource-intensive and expensive proposition to continue to maintain their service desk application.

With Giva, BMC Service Desk Express customers on average experienced a:

45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than BMC annual maintenance)
90% decrease in implementation time and cost
Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Giva Service Management Suite™		BMC Service Desk Express Suite 9.x
Customers experienced a 45% decrease in annual software maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than BMC annual maintenance cost)	vs.	Purchase licenses, servers, software and add-on modules. Also, significant FTE headcount and expensive consultants required for ongoing "care and feeding"
Coded from the ground-up with a Web-native architecture and built in 1999 for the Internet	vs.	Architected before the Internet-client/server
Web 2.0 Intuitive Design—Agents can learn in just 1 hour	vs.	Client/server interface
Implementation in just 1 week	vs.	Implementation often measured in months and quarters
Architecture built on ITIL from our first line of code-modules seamlessly integrated	vs.	A legacy application that evolved with add-ons
Quarterly enhancements are seamless with Giva Software-as-Service (SaaS)	vs.	With traditional software, upgrades will distract your business, cost significant fees, require FTE headcount and expensive consultants

Click for a TCO or ROI Analysis

Click to watch a video of Giva eHelpDesk

Build or Buy a Help Desk/Customer Service Application? Part 3

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:47:34 -0700

Here are the Last Few Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk/Customer Service Software Package.

Of course, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can save you a lot of money and SaaS vendors can get you up and running faster than deploying software on your own infrastructure. Our main point is that building your own help desk or customer service application really makes little economic sense. There are many products that are commercially available. Surely, there are a number of products that can meet your needs. We see many companies live to regret trying to build and maintain a product on their own.

Reason Four: You will have access to patches, updates, user groups, updated documentation, and technical support when the product is released and when you need it.

Reason Three: No matter how good the training, and no matter how great the documentation, sooner or later you will need to call the vendor’s technical support. This need usually arises at the worst possible time and inevitably involves a customer. Developers are busy people and you have to ask yourself if the in-house developers will be available when you need them. Most vendors have help desks that are open 24/7 and are literally waiting for your call.

Reason Two: Updates. A purchased product is continually updated, debugged and readied for your immediate use. With an in-house product your staff will usually be debugging the update after it is installed. This is not fair to your staff, your customers, or your boss.

Reason One: You can purchase, train on and implement a purchased product in a fraction of the time it takes to design, code, document, train on and implement an in-house product. A software development project can easily take on a life of its own and by developing an in-house product you are competing with paying customers. Unless you work for one of those unique companies mentioned earlier and unless your help desk can command the resources it needs, when it needs them, the chances are that in-house development will be prohibitively costly, time consuming, frustrating to train on and difficult to implement.

See our white papers at http://www.givainc.com/white-papers/index.htm

Build or Buy a Help Desk/Customer Service Application? Part 2

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:27:15 -0700

In a poor economy, we get this question a lot. What should I do, build or buy a help desk or customer service application?

Here are the Top Ten Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk Software Package:

Reason Seven: Help desk software packages can be easily customized to meet your support operation’s unique needs. You won’t get this capability in an in-house product without a great deal of extra work and time.

Reason Six: The product you purchase will have voluminous documentation that is both technical and end-user oriented. It may even have CBT disks available and will certainly have on-site as well as off-site training programs available to train your staff. An in-house product will rarely have such documentation.

Reason Five: The documentation and training will be at least three times better with a purchased product than it will be with an in-house product. You will not have to compete with the internal documentation and training staff that get paid to serve paying customers.

See our white papers at http://www.givainc.com/white-papers/index.htm

Build or Buy a Help Desk or Customer Service Product?

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:16:55 -0700

In a poor economy, we get this question a lot. What should I do, build or buy a help desk or customer service application?

What Do You Get With A Purchased Product?
The short answer is, a lot. Help desk software vendors spend millions of dollars and months of effort in determining what features go into their products. In addition, their sales, marketing, and technical support staffs have an intimate knowledge of help desk operations, trends, and requirements.

Here are the Top Ten Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk Software Package:

Reason Ten: The product already exists and you won’t have to spend time, money and political capital negotiating with a development executive to liberate already scarce resources.

Reason Nine: The vendor you choose has an understanding of how help desks work and what they need in a software package. Developers don’t always have this understanding and explaining it to them can take time, and time is money.

Reason Eight: Almost every help desk software package in the world can be purchased in modules. You can add and delete modules based upon your business needs and budget.

See our white papers at http://www.givainc.com/white-papers/index.htm

BMC Remedy® ARS System 7 Upgrades, Maintenance & Consulting

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:48:27 -0700

BMC Remedy Cost Relief

Eliminate Remedy upgrades & software maintenance with Giva SaaS

Is the very high cost of BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS) consulting, upgrades and software maintenance not in your IT budget?

BMC Remedy customers face a resource-intensive complex re-implementation to upgrade to version 7.x. Remedy 7 is a code "rewrite" and requires a complete re-implementation and customization.

With Giva, Remedy customers on average experienced a:

45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than Remedy annual maintenance)
90% decrease in implementation time and cost
Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Get a quote from your BMC Remedy consultant and then contact Giva.

Giva will prepare a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis and a Return-On-Investment Analysis (ROI) detailing how much money and headcount your company will save over the next 3 years.

See the following link for details and watch the 2 minute video on Giva's new Dashboard.

http://www.givainc.com/bmc-remedy-7-upgrade-consulting/index.htm

What Drives Software-as-a-Service? Why can you save money?

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:43:03 -0700

A specialized software provider can target global markets: A company that made software for human resource management at boutique hotels might once have had a hard time finding enough of a market to sell its applications. But a hosted application can instantly reach the entire market, making specialization within a vertical not only possible, but preferable. This in turn means that SaaS providers can often deliver products that meet their markets’ needs more closely than traditional “shrinkwrap” vendors could.

Web systems are reliable enough: Despite sporadic outages and slow-downs, most people are willing to use the public Internet, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the TCP/IP stack to deliver business functions to end users.

Security is sufficiently well trusted and transparent: With the broad adoption of SSL, organizations have a way of reaching their applications without the complexity and burden of end-user configurations or VPNs.

Availability of enablement technology: According to IDC, organizations developing enablement technology that allow other vendors to quickly build SaaS applications will be important in driving adoption. Because of SaaS' relative infancy, many companies have either built enablement tools or platforms or are in the process of engineering enablement tools or platforms. A Saugatuck study shows that the industry will most likely converge to three or four enablers that will act as SaaS Integration Platforms (SIPs).

Wide Area Network's bandwidth has grown drastically following Moore's Law (more than 100% increase each 24 months) and is about to reach slow local networks bandwidths. Added to network quality of service improvement this has driven people and companies to trustfully access remote locations and applications with low latencies and acceptable speeds.