Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2021

Top 3 NLP Use Cases for ITSM

What is NLP Natural Language Processing is a specialized subdomain of Machine Learning which is generally concerned with the interactions between the human and machine using a human verbal or written language. NLP helps in processing huge volumes of text which would take a significant amount of time for a human to comprehend and process otherwise. Hence a lot of organizations take advantage of NLP to gain useful insights out of their text and free formatted data.

How important is middleware monitoring for organizations?

As any organization grows and goes wider and bigger, their infrastructure and the IT landscape also expands. The “N” number of dependencies and running tasks at a moment needs careful monitoring. However, bigger the organization, the more complex and difficult it gets to monitor the transitions and communication. Without the smooth transactions and perfectly running operations team, day-to-day business would go through many hurdles.

Working from home: Remembering an unforgettable year

March 11, 2020. Does that date ring a bell? For many, it won’t soon be forgotten. It’s the day when many companies across the globe closed their doors to keep workers safe from the pandemic. ServiceNow employees were told, “Be safe and go home.” This marked the official beginning of our work-from-home experience, one that turned our work lives—and many personal lives—upside down.

Why You Should Switch To A Modern Cloud-Based ITSM Solution.

Is my service desk investment paying off? Is my service desk delivering true business value? Are we incurring costs that are not under control? Are we able to leverage the service desk beyond IT use cases? If your current ITSM solution makes you question its true value and reliability, are you even using the right ITSM tool? We don’t think so! Let’s get one thing straight. We don’t advocate a one-size-fits-all approach.

3 ways to digitally transform the customer experience

In an age when customers voice their dissatisfaction by ranting on social media or quietly taking their business to a competitor, it’s more important than ever to keep them engaged with—and coming back to—your brand. At ServiceNow, we’re committed to helping you workflow a better customer experience. Learn practical, attainable ways to engage your customers through these four webinars.

How to Structure Your IT Service Desk to Support Process Improvements

Buying a modern service desk tool won’t solve all your problems in and of itself. Although these tools are designed to ensure general best practices are met, service desk tools must also be configured to address your organization’s specific essential protocols. In a recent Info-Tech study that surveyed 623 organizations worldwide, the most frequently adopted service management processes are.

No going back: COVID-19 is catalyst for digital transformation

As the world begins to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more business leaders are focused on preparing for future crises. This is driving a workflow revolution as companies strive to stay both agile and resilient. Against that backdrop, ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright facilitated a panel of experts from the public sector, healthcare, and technology industries.

Setting Up Your Service Desk - The People, Process, and Technology

The service desk acts as the primary support mechanism in organizations, managing customer contacts for assistance and access to services. Their primary purpose includes the following: The service desk can manage their daily challenges in many ways. Still, the design and architecture of delivering services and a set of robust communication channels, powered by sufficient automation, collectively help the service desk excel and provide an excellent customer/consumer experience.

How to Improve IT Service Desk Performance

IT Service Desks are developed as an efficient mechanism of delivering quick help whenever your employees need it. But as businesses grow, so does the request volume and the pressure on the technicians to attend every call and resolve a ticket. And with the onset of the work-from-home necessity induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT teams are struggling to efficiently support a remote workforce with minimum resources.

ITSM Buyers' Guide: 7 Use Cases to Define Your ITSM Goals

Attempting an upgrade or switch to a new ITSM tool is obstacle-ridden for IT directors. From having to address fears surrounding the cost of switching vendors to assessing service management maturity, building a case around why and how an ITSM can advance the business can be a harrowing feat. Thankfully, Info-Tech pulled together this selection guide.

New Customer Service Ops Guide: Introducing Full-Case Ownership

In the world of digital transformation, keeping the focus on the customer experience is paramount. Systems are complex and increasingly distributed, which makes it difficult to stay on top of things when something goes wrong. Customer service teams are the gateway to the customer, and more often than not they are the first line of defense when something goes wrong. The role of customer service teams is critical to maintaining and exceeding customer expectations.

Not All Metrics Are Good Metrics

The old saying goes like this: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix or improve it.” This reflects the obvious notion you can’t measure what you don’t monitor. But this isn’t where the story ends—it’s vitally important to choose, carefully and deliberately, what one measures and monitors. It’s also important to understand metrics in the overall context of an organization’s environment and goals.

The 30th Anniversary of RSA Would Have Been One Heck of a Party

There is no doubt that a virtual RSA is not the same as catching up with colleagues and partners over great food, and of course meeting up at the W Bar. The good news is we all have or are adjusting to working remotely and we didn’t have to travel to hear what the industry luminaries think, or what our peers are saying they can do to keep the world safe.

ITIL 4 High-velocity IT: How High Velocity Organizations Enable Resilience & Anti-fragility

During this period of global crisis and disruption, organizations depend on their IT departments and suppliers to deploy digital collaboration and management platforms at increasing speed while at the same time requiring stable operations, increased availability, and security.

What are Server Monitoring Best Practices?

Server Monitoring is referred to as consistent monitoring of all network infrastructure, related to servers to analyses their resource utilization trends & later optimize it for a smooth end-user experience. The concept of server monitoring is straight forward, it is the collection of data from servers & real time or historical data analysis to make sure that the network servers are free from impending issues are performing optimally thereby fulfilling their intended function.

Google I/O Announcements - What Do Ivanti Customers Need to Know?

This week Google unveiled a number of exciting announcements at its annual developers’ conference, Google I/O 2021. Announcements included Android 12 and several security and privacy features that are coming to its platforms. At Ivanti, we are particularly excited about what Google is doing to improve user security and privacy. The consistent theme of Google I/O was Secure by default, Private by design, and You’re in control.

MobileIron (acquired by Ivanti) Wins Two Prestigious Marketing Awards!

There are some marketing campaigns that just work. They resonate with their audience, they add value, they’re interesting and topical – but they’re also rare. In 2020, the MobileIron (now Ivanti) communications team launched a new campaign to tell the story of the Everywhere Enterprise (a precursor to Ivanti’s Everywhere Workplace).

ServiceNow integrates SecOps with Microsoft to boost user security

Over the past year, organizations worldwide have seen an increasing number of cyberattacks. Phishing and vulnerability exploits continue to be leading attack channels. The content adapts to the times (COVID-19-related phishing, for example), but the attack channels themselves are not new. Combating these attack types requires a focus on transforming security operations and response.

Automate Self-Service Workflows from ServiceNow with the Puppet Spoke

Puppet Spoke empowers your team to deliver changes in a faster, more efficient manner by creating a single platform experience between Puppet and ServiceNow. Users can trigger automation workflows such as installing packages, rebooting machines, and orchestrate changes across their environments without ever leaving ServiceNow.

Press Pause on Auto-Renewals: How to Brave a Software Switch

One of the biggest reasons organizations don’t try out a new software vendor is the perceived costs of switching. Most cite the fear of implementation being too expensive, too difficult, or too time-consuming—all excuses to justify maintaining a vendor contract, even if that vendor is performing poorly and not meeting expectations. But what’s at risk when organizations simply renew year after year? Who loses if the status quo is maintained?

Accelerate operational tasks with Puppet and ServiceNow

As your DevOps and IT Service Management (ITSM) teams continue to increase, so should your ability to provide self-service infrastructure capabilities. Whether you are a ServiceNow or Puppet administrator looking to expand automation to other groups such as Site Reliability Engineering or the IT Service Desk, the integration of Puppet Enterprise and ServiceNow is now at your fingertips.

How to achieve faster time-to-value with Freshservice?

According to the latest report on ITSM in 2021 and beyond, when asked what main area their service desk would be focusing on in 2021, the largest proportion of respondents specified they will be focusing on automation of processes, tasks, and ticket handling. Some of the biggest trends are around Chatbots and Virtual Agents, as specified by 44% of respondents, and self-service, as specified by 42% of respondents.

9 Common Change Management Mistakes and How To Solve Them

Customer preferences are constantly evolving, just as much as technology. This can have a significant impact on your business and its internal operations. Such fast-paced evolution demands an equally fast change management function. Organizations that focus just on the mechanics of change management but ignore the principles and intended outcomes are likely to make mistakes. But you can avoid these mistakes through intelligent design and application of change management.

9 Common Change Management Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

Customer preferences are constantly evolving, just as much as technology. This can have a significant impact on your business and its internal operations. Such fast-paced evolution demands an equally fast change management function. Organizations that focus just on the mechanics of change management but ignore the principles and intended outcomes are likely to make mistakes. But you can avoid these mistakes through intelligent design and application of change management.

7 Habits I&O Leaders Should Replace in 2021

As the digital-first operating world evolves, IT organizations are struggling to decide which practices to maintain and which to phase out. This transition from a “plan/build/run” lifecycle to a more agile, team-oriented structure has become the catalyst for organizational conflict, challenging the very foundation of how companies should operate.

The Business Value of Integrating ITAM with ITSM

As organizations experience increasing complexity and expanding perimeters, IT professionals are looking to get a better understanding into their distributed software and hardware assets. IT teams need immediate access to detailed information in context of services and underlying assets they run on to make more intelligent decisions about their IT investments. Having asset visibility at their fingertips enables them to maximize cost savings, secure assets, and improve the employee experience.

Quick Demo: Leaky App Detection and Remediation

Here's a quick two-minute video demonstrating the power of Ivanti's UEM for Mobile and Mobile Threat Defense and this time detecting a leaky app, specifically the very popular video-sharing TikTok app. Tiktok has had a history of vulnerabilities where the personal information of users was exposed and could have potentially been harvested and leaked out by malicious cyber threat actors.

How government can meet the rising demand for digital services

The pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated digital transformation for organizations of all sizes and across all sectors. With that change, Canadians’ expectations for streamlined, simple digital services are shifting, too. Citizens are now looking for consumer-grade experiences from government. With demand for digital experiences increasing across all generations of Canadians, government has an opportunity to streamline their services for the digital age.

Automation for the (Cost-Savings) Win!

The experienced IT professional is no stranger to the term “automation.” However, many don’t fully grasp the potential this word presents to IT processes, including the fast-growing realm of intelligent automation. But before you start looking to automation to help rein in costs, it’s important to develop an automation strategy that best fits the needs of your organization. This article explores the three key areas in which to start when building your automation framework.

Quick Solutions To Improve The Customer Experience

In today’s business environment, consumers and organizations have a different relationship altogether. Modern consumers have become more informed, and are not driven merely by quality or low prices. Gone are the days of product-oriented advertisements that focused just on the tangible benefits of a product or where premium quality was associated with better brands.

Avoid Market Pressures That Compromise Mobile App Security

The marketplace for mobile apps is a broad and highly competitive one. There are millions of apps available on Apple’s App store, Google Play, and within private enterprise app stores. Expanding market demands continue to drive the pressure to innovate. New iOS and Android updates and mobile device releases, along with myriad apps from companies vying for their customer’s attention, are creating shorter app release cycles.

3 Tips to Prepare for an Online Holiday Shopping Surge

With Memorial Day right around the corner, customers are preparing their carts for a weekend of online sales and shopping. Unfortunately, the increase in online traffic for holiday sales is ripe with potential for issues. Similar to the glitches and crashes we see during holiday weekends such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the potential of website issues may increase with online traffic during Memorial Day weekend sales. Luckily, there are ways IT pros can prepare for a surge.

Pipeline Ransomware. Could I Be Next?

If you have been following the news or trying to buy gas in Atlanta, you probably have already heard about the ransomware attack on one of the most important strategic pipelines in the US. 2020 saw ransomware attacks skyrocket and now 2021 seems to be following the trend. The current situation begs us to rethink how we think about our security practices and mindset. One area of security that you may have heard about is Zero Trust (ZT).

How PagerDuty Leverages Customer Service Ops to Delight Customers

Connection, empathy, and speedy responses are more important in the Customer Support world today than they ever have been before. I’m writing this while sitting in the same place I have worked from for the last year: in my dining room-turned-office, pads of sticky notes, and various charging cables keeping my cookbooks company on the shelf. Prior to March 2020, I commuted to an open office almost every weekday.

The journey to AIOps begins with an automation-first mindset

AIOps isn’t an IT magic wand, but it sometimes works like one. One day last fall, our IT ops team was heads down on a major cloud migration project. Meanwhile, ServiceNow Event Management detected a high volume of alerts from the monitoring system—600% more than usual. That typically means a lot of unplanned work for our IT team, not to mention a delay in our cloud migration schedule.

Quick Demo: Updated Magisk Systemless Root Detection and Remediation

Magisk is a very sophisticated systemless rooting technique that can bypass Google's SafetyNet attestation and allow apps like Google Pay, many banking apps, and even Fortnite and Pokémon Go games to be installed on a rooted Android device. Rooting an Android device is popular to allow the user to customize and tweak their device by allowing the installation of third-party apps and tools, removavl of bloatware, and speed up the processor and network.

Ivanti User Workspace Manager Update: 2021.1 Release

Ivanti User Workspace Manager (UWM) 2021.1 is a major release focused on quality, stability and several feature enhancements. As of version 2021.1, Application Control offers a native user interface inside the AC console. This interface presents an aggregated view of events captured from all managed endpoints. The events are filtered and categorized on a per-feature basis and can be seamlessly translated into policy actions via drag-and-drop functionality.

The customer service imperative: Digital operations and engagement

Without question, the largest disruption the customer service market has ever experienced happened at the beginning of the pandemic. Millions of customer service agents across the globe were sent home overnight, causing major disruptions for companies that were too reliant on manual processes and tribal knowledge. Agents didn’t have the necessary tools in this new remote environment, and customers experienced unprecedented wait times as a result, with some requests never being answered.

ServiceNow named a Leader in Low-Code Development Platforms

I’m very pleased to announce that ServiceNow has been named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms for Professional Developers, Q2 2021. We attribute this recognition to our latest low-code innovations and capabilities. According to this evaluation, “ServiceNow has grown to a low-code platform of the first rank. Known for its IT service management solutions, ServiceNow has invested heavily in its low-code tooling and ‘workflow platform’ messaging.

eBonding Integration: ServiceNow Incidents to 5 Destinations: PagerDuty, Twilio, Slack, ElasticSearch/Kibana and Email

In this blog, we will walk through the scenario of sending or E-bonding ServiceNow incidents to 5 destinations simultaneously, using Robotic Data Automation and AIOps Studio. E-bonding refers to a scenario where data is delivered (one-way) or synchronized (two-way) between two or different systems, which are typically under different administrative boundaries. E-Bonding term originally appeared in Service Provider and Telco space (see: ATT E-Bonding).

Changing how work gets done with Employee Journey Management

COVID-19 accelerated many of the changes that were happening at work pre-pandemic, setting off a spike in innovation as companies developed new workflows to address these changes. According to ServiceNow’s 2021 Employee Experience Imperative Study that surveyed 3,000 employees at large enterprise companies in North America and Europe, 62% of employees believe COVID-19 will have a significant impact on their work experience for years to come.

What Agencies Should Consider Regarding Multi-Cloud Implementations

Multi-cloud architectures have long been hyped for their performance, reliability, and cost savings—and adoption is soaring. According to a 2020 survey from IDG, 55% of organizations use two or more public clouds. Yet 79% of these adopters struggle to achieve synergy across multiple platforms. These concerns are echoed in the public sector.

Cost Challenges That Keep Execs and Admins Awake at Night

Reining in costs and ensuring your IT organization maximizes its technical ROI is a delicate balancing act of office politics and well-rooted processes. IT cost challenges tend to vary from business to business, but they have one thing in common: they’re all manageable. Taking the time to study the most common IT revenue black holes starts with developing an in-depth understanding of how each one can affect IT productivity and the business’s bottom line.

Improve Your Customer Operations To Increase Your NPS

If you want to improve your customer operations, your attention must turn to your NPS score. The Net Promoter Score for your organization should never be overlooked. This can provide you with vital insights into how your services are perceived by customers. Those actively attempting to improve their NPS scores should focus on improving customer operations. Those running customer-centric businesses recognize the undeniable importance of operating around their needs.

Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence: SaaS Management

You’re probably familiar with the many benefits of licensing software using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. The most frequently touted benefit is that you pay only for what you use when you use it. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about upgrading, or server maintenance, or security. That’s all taken care of. However, even using a SaaS model, you still need to monitor and manage costs, which can be a challenge if you are working with several suppliers.

SLA Compliance: The Service Desk & ITSM Metric Explained

IT solutions are either utilized as a service or procured from third-party vendors by organizations of all types and sizes. This enables organizations to gain access to reliable IT technologies without having to internally build, operate, or manage the underlying systems. As a result of this, both the organization and the solutions provider sign a service-level agreement (SLA), which commits the vendor to deliver services that meet the established performance requirements.

Cybersecurity is Fundamental for Modernizing Government

Digital transformation is a strategic initiative of the federal government and has been for years, but adequate funding has never been appropriated. Digital transformation is essential within all areas of government, to deliver services faster, more reliably, and securely. In order to keep up with the global expansion of digitalization, government agencies must modernize their IT and security infrastructure.

Ivanti Gives Voice to IT Incident Management Software

A protracted, exasperating customer service experience popped into my mind while reading this sentence in the Ivanti Voice data sheet: “One of the most frequent customer complaints about call centers is having to repeat information.” Ain’t that the truth. Here’s a brief personal experience.

Clearing IT bottlenecks with citizen developers

“I can clear your IT bottlenecks” is all it took. When my colleague approached me and asked if my organization would be interested in participating in the citizen developer pilot project, I signed on right away. After all, who wouldn’t want to clear their backlog? [Learn more about ServiceNow citizen developers at Knowledge 2021.] As the director of IT customer success, I lead teams that help deliver transformation initiatives at scale. Fulfilling business needs is also my priority.

Knowledge 2021: Industry spotlight

Every executive follows trends in their industry to keep tabs on competitors. There’s often equal value in applying insights from innovators in other sectors. Knowledge 2021 attendees can do both. Presentations from companies in five major industries—manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, telecom, and government—will show digital transformation trends in each sector.

3 Key Features Every Service Desk Needs

Modern enterprises must work to ensure their organization is focused on making employees feel heard and valued, and a key way to do this is through strong IT service management. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—today’s employees expect a similar service experience in the workplace that they encounter in their daily lives.

Alloy Software Wins Gold In 2021 American Business Awards

Bloomfield, NJ – May 4th, 2021 — Alloy Software, a leading provider of IT Service Management and Asset Management solutions, announced today that it was named the winner of a Gold Stevie® Award in the IT Service Management category in the 19th Annual American Business Awards® today. All judges praised Alloy Software for its achievements and highest customer satisfaction ratings.

Shared Services Teams For Great Customer Experiences

Have you ever considered integrating shared services teams into your organization’s existing operation? If you are committed to driving efficiency across your organization, there has never been a better time to explore the utilization of shared services teams for improved customer experiences. In this guide, we will break down the potential benefits of shared services teams. There is an undeniable link between customer satisfaction and organizational structure.

5 fixes for the customer experience quandary

Customers expect products and services to work. When they don’t, customers want fast, permanent solutions. But delivering against that expectation is easier said than done. Multiple barriers stand in the way of your organization delivering the seamless experiences customers expect. Let’s explore five ways to improve customer service.