Service desk offering also attempts to move emphasis from IT towards people.

Businesses wishing to fast track best practice might want to look at a new offering from Hornbill which pledges to deliver quick wins and improvements to the service desk.

Called Supportworks ITSM Foundations, the product is essentially a slimmed down version of Hornbill’s flagship suite, but focuses on the key ITIL processes; incident, problem, service levels and asset/configuration management.

Pat Bolger, Hornbill’s chief marketing officer, explained to ServiceDesk360 why this product is exactly what customers have been asking for. “Many businesses struggle to raise the funds needed to buy a full ITIL solution. The majority also want to start with the ITIL basics, and show that the changes they have made are delivering results before investing further. Typically, you have six months goodwill for a project and if you are not proving value after that, you will struggle to maintain support”.

Bolger says that the Foundations product can be running “within days, rather than weeks”, but because it is a full service desk, it allows businesses to introduce the terminology and new working practices which can be scaled up as and when needed.

The product also features Hornbill’s Human Touch functionality, which is designed to shift thinking away from pure IT and instead understanding the value delivered to users. Traditionally, if you ring a service desk, the analyst has no information about your level of competency, what services you value most etc. Human Touch means that when you call, the analyst knows things such as your history, occurring problems, how satisfied you are, and can adjust the call to suit. As the level of intelligence builds, the service desk will be able to study the findings and improve its services accordingly.

“ITIL Version 3 is about putting the emphasis on services, not IT. The next step is becoming people centric”, concludes Bolger.