When
the Hot Line Service evolved to the Help Desk in September
1997, a commercial Help Desk software was deployed to assist
the day-to-day operations of the office. (See Network
Computing, Issue 12 - September 1997 for details.)
Since then, the software has been further developed to automate
the submission and processing of CSC Work Requests, desktop
maintenance support service, the network registration process,
the network port security protection, student resident phone
support services, WLAN registration, the departmental server
registrations, and so on. The Help Desk report, reflecting
user problems, service requests, resolutions and support details,
has become a very useful tool for service quality enhancement.
With this report, we have a complete way to improve our internal
efficiency. (See Network
Computing, Issue 45 - September 2005 for details.)
However, due to the limited features of the current Help Desk
software, we anticipate that it will be unable to fulfil our
future needs in service management, and therefore, we need
better software with richer functions. Furthermore, when more
and more extended applications are developed on top of the
software and run on the hardware, performance and redundancy
have become important issues.
As documented in the 5-year IS strategic plan, we will step
up to the best practices for IT Service Management (ITSM)
recommended in the renowned ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library).
These recommended best practices can help us streamline our
operations, making our services more robust, reliable, maintainable,
and efficient. However, the ITIL processes cannot be implemented
in a vacuum. The ITSM software provides a developmental framework
for the implementation of ITIL processes, including the formation
of an Integrated Service Desk that can be beneficial to the
University. As such, we have upgraded the Help Desk software
to the ITSM software which supports a wider scope of IT service
management for our genuine needs in the long run. With ITSM,
ITIL processes can be built on top of it for enhancing the
service support and service delivery.
In order to avoid single-point of failure and unsatisfactory
performance, new servers were acquired to support the new
ITSM software. The database is now separated from the application
system so that performance can be improved and redundancy
can be built into both the database and the application system,
providing high availability, reliability and efficiency.
The new ITSM software is now under trial and will be put into
production together with some newly developed functions in
early May. As a starting point, the out-of-box ITSM software
can help us improve problem management, change management
and release management in addition to the well received incident
management (Help Desk service). Although ITIL processes will
not be completely implemented in the near future, getting
familiar with the ITSM software and understanding its capabilities
will surely facilitate the design and implementation of ITIL
processes.