When Sharjah Museums Authority was seeking to improve its operational efficiency while delivering and supporting its IT services, it deployed ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus to benefit from its best practice ITSM workflows. Benefits have included greater visibility over IT operations, improved service delivery, while providing easy browser-based access to processes, procedures and instructions. Alyas Aziz Malik, Head of Technical Support, IT Department at Sharjah Museums Authority, a government agency, tells us more.
What necessitated your decision to implement the solution?
At Sharjah Museums Authority (SMA) we were seeking to improve our operational efficiency while delivering and supporting our IT services and aligning these with our business goals. This directed us to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for guidance. ITIL provides a framework of high-level definitions for IT Service Management (ITSM) processes.
Our IT department did not have detailed ITSM best practices to fall back on. Instead, we would end up struggling through a detailed definition and configuration process without clear guidelines. But, to implement an ITIL-based ITSM solution involves long and costly process-definition cycles as well as internal resistance to ‘reinventing the wheel’. In addition, we needed multiple iterations to align our organisation’s process and enable technology configuration with ITIL processes, procedures and work instructions. Those iterations tended to increase cost, implementation efforts and timelines.
Return on IT (RoIT) and time to value have become key decision parameters in IT projects. We needed better assistance from a vendor to design and implement ITSM best practices, faster and cost efficiently. ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus with best practice ITSM workflows is designed with all these considerations in mind. Therefore, in 2010 we implemented ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.
Can you explain how ServiceDesk Plus has provided greater visibility and control over your IT infrastructure?
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus not only provides greater visibility over our IT operations but also mitigates the risks. The product has helped our IT department to improve service delivery and support while providing easy browser-based access to processes, procedures and instructions. After integrating with ManageEngine OpManager, we are now able to manage our IT infrastructure so well that we have better control over the IT infrastructure.
The advanced best practices solution includes:
• ITIL reference model
• Predefined service management processes, complete with detailed procedures and work instructions, presented in an intuitive web-based format
• Incident and service request management
• Problem management
• Configuration management
• Change management
• Service-level management
• Asset management with IT asset scanning and option for creating relationship and history of the assets.
What is the benefit of having reduced ticket response times?
Often, process definition can undermine execution plans. Best practice ITSM workflows enable critical benefits, allowing us to significantly reduce the time spent on process definition efforts and to devote fewer internal and external IT resources to these efforts. In addition, ServiceDesk Plus provides a step-by-step approach for registering a service request. This approach guides our help desk team through all actions that drive a service request to closure.
In essence, these best practices support consistent operations across our IT department, improving service quality as we reduce the process definition efforts that are boosting the complexity and cost of our deployment. ServiceDesk Plus improves our ability to deliver world-class support. Moreover, the tool greatly reduces the risks and issues associated with defining processes, procedures and work instructions that cannot be supported.
How has ManageEngine helped Sharjah Museums Authority overcome its network challenges?
ServiceDesk Plus is a powerful tool to create and map asset relationships, giving high level control of IT assets across the network. Integrating the tool with ManageEngine’s OpManager has helped us identify issues with any network device, log the incident automatically and assign issues to the right IT admins for resolution. This has helped us manage our time, efforts and resources and helped us be better prepared to manage future requirements.
How far has the system future proofed your company?
ITIL framework is a set of best practices which caters to an organisation’s current and future needs. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is built on this framework and is continuously updated to its most recent versions. The tool also provides us the option to link the service requests, incidents and change requests with SLA, this establishes a time frame in which the problem or issue assigned to an IT administrator must be resolved. We have been able to measure the performance of our team and the time taken to resolve issues is helping us to be better prepared in the future. We have also been conducting surveys through SDP to understand how satisfied our users are with the service provided.
Seeing great results with the product, we recently introduced it in our Human Resources (HR) department as well to receive all the calls and cater to any employee issues or requests efficiently.
Did the system require any additional training for staff?
It is always recommended to understand the system to our best benefits. And training is one of the best sources to acquire knowledge about any software and to make full use of it. Therefore, additional training was needed for the IT department.
How long did it take to implement the solutions?
ServiceDesk Plus is a very user-friendly application and can be implemented easily, compared to other products in the market. Initially, we had a team that was not very familiar with all the implementation procedures and still, it was effortless. It took us almost two months to fully implement the software in our organisation with the help of ManageEngine and since the application was customised. The most time we took was to customise the application to meet our specific needs, which made it a lot easier for our users to understand and adopt it.
How did the vendor meet your objectives and what selection process did you adopt?
We were introduced to ManageEngine through Elitser Technologies. We have now been working with Elitser for over 10 years and they have always supported us on time and with their best effort. We had conducted a long process with multiple functionality wise criteria that needed to be fulfilled before finalising on ManageEngine. The product also complied with three important parameters we had defined – user-friendly, cost-efficient and multilingual.
How impressed have you been with the support offered by ManageEngine?
We have been using ServiceDesk Plus for 11 years now and it has been exceptionally good. ManageEngine has always been there to provide support and services to our users when needed. I would recommend ServiceDesk Plus and ManageEngine to other organisations as well.
