3 reasons to combine ITSM with UIM

Why is User Identity Management important for ITSM

User Identity Management is not necessarily the most pressing priority for businesses when it comes to their IT Service Management. But there are three very good reasons for moving it up the list.

User Identity Management is:

  1. Good for the user
  2. Good for the IT team or department
  3. Good for the company

The User

Most employees need access to numerous apps just to do their everyday work. Once they have logged on to their computer/laptop/tablet or even smart phone, they will often need to spend time logging into these individual apps when they are needed. This will require different passwords and perhaps usernames for each.

Maybe your employee’s role changes, they get a promotion or start working in a new team with new requirements. They will need to ask and wait for new apps to be downloaded into their system and new access rights to be approved. All this takes time out of the employee’s day.

Installing a good user identity management tool, such as OneLogin, is a small step that can make a big difference. Each employee will have a single login point for all their apps. This means they have access to all the apps they need as soon as they log on to their desktop. If their role changes, the new apps can be added instantly at a touch of a button, including access rights, and will appear when the employee logs on next.

The IT Team

Security is a big hurdle for IT. Helping employees to stay connected to what they need, without have to spend time installing and changing access and passwords for multiple apps on a range of devices is time-consuming. Passwords being shared to enable faster access to apps is a real security concern. And if employees bring in their own laptops, how can the IT team ensure that the apps they are given access to are secure outside of the office? If an employee leaves the company suddenly, IT needs to remove access immediately.

Again, this is where User Identity Management can help. It can streamline the installation for new starters and add and remove apps from individual users at the touch of a button, whichever device the user works on. IT will not have to waste time providing new logins for new apps or recreating new passwords to replace those forgotten or shared.

The Company

For all these reasons, User Identity Management is good for the business as a whole. It makes the company more secure, more efficient and more effective.

Please let us know if you would like to learn more.

Connected ITSM – Personalised Service

Can your ITSM tool properly serve individuals and learn from each interaction?

Let’s take a minute to look at OneLogin and how it can unlock greater ITSM performance.

Personalised service is becoming the norm, whether you are an employee of a mid-to-large organisation or a customer seeking help with a product or service. At its best, most people won’t notice that their enquiry is being handled in a step-by-step process. They will simply feel well taken care of and, hopefully, receive the information or resolution they require.

The limitations of knowledge in ITSM

ITSM tools are only as good as the processes configured to take care of such customer enquiries. Typically, tools are limited to the knowledge of the person or people setting up the processes within the system. Service can quickly come apart when customer demand shifts or a new issue arises.

ITSM tools have long utilised knowledge bases to automate and adapt service. The team operating them typically uses knowledge data to help with new and existing customer issues. But the right knowledge can be hard to access and difficult to automate, preventing fast and efficient service from call handlers.

Delivering personalised, targeted knowledge with OneLogin

This is where an identity management solution – combining your service management tool with OneLogin, revolutionises the collection and delivery of accurate knowledge and improved service. But this is not just the management of user logins, it is the ability to match and assign Active Directory users to services and to then enable the creation of a more agile service structure where knowledge can be properly stored and accessed. Services are more personalised, knowledge is more targeted and the system is able to grow and adapt. This means the need to rethink tool processes and engage in time-consuming and expensive maintenance is removed. In addition, this has the benefit of increasing user adoption. Agents find the system easier to use and customers receive a better, more automated experience.

How can Revo help deliver this?

Revo helps organisations to deliver a more joined-up, collaborative and personalised service management capability. 4me – takes care of the service management; OneLogin – deals with user identity management; and Revo connects and integrates other applications for improved service performance. We call this joined-up approach Business Service Management, and we would love to demonstrate its capabilities. Please let us know if you would like to learn more.

4me Auto Translation

4me launches Auto Translation to remove language barriers that impede collaboration

4me has just announced that its Auto Translation feature has been released. This feature is intended to remove language barriers that may hinder collaboration. Not having to hire support specialists who speak multiple languages can significantly drive down the support costs for service providers. It also eliminates a problem for organizations that operate in countries such as Canada and Belgium where they are legally required to give their employees the ability to work in the official languages of those countries.

4me’s Auto Translation feature can significantly improve efficiency by allowing enterprise employees and the experts who support them to work in their preferred language. This feature works in 4me for all requests, problems, releases, changes, change tasks, projects and project tasks. When someone opens one of these records, the Auto Translation feature starts by detecting the language in which each note is written. Any notes that are written in a language other than the user’s language are then translated for the user.

Cor Winkler Prins, CEO at 4me explains:

“Users already had their language registered in 4me. This ensured that 4me’s user interface is presented in the user’s preferred language. Now 4me automatically translates any note that is written in a language other than the user’s preferred language. We have also made sure that multilingual users can turn off Auto Translation for any additional languages they are comfortable with. When releasing an exciting feature such as this, we endeavor to make it as easy as possible to use. That is why Auto Translation also works in the 4me App and 4me Self Service. That allows end users and support specialists to all work in their preferred language.”

4me’s Auto Translation feature already supports 20 of the world’s most spoken languages. It is free of charge and already available for all 4me customers.

 

SITS19 VLOG

4me, Business Service Management and collaboration in 2019 and beyond

VLOG – watch Martijn Adams and Simon Martin discuss 4me, Business Service Management and how the service industry is being transformed.

While attending SITS19, Martijn and Simon took time out to discuss the Service Management industry and how 4me and Revo are helping customers to transform their businesses and the services that they offer to their customers.

Martijn Adams on the market today:

“These days, you see that the services that companies provide to their employees are no longer just delivered by the company itself, they have many different service providers. Research shows that the average company has 13.5 service providers helping them to deliver services. The problem that we see is that you need to be able to collaborate, to monitor their performance and to track their SLAs. “

Simon Martin on how technology can help:

“On our journey we have been looking at different products and we selected 4me due to an alignment with both the market need and our own vision – to make delivering service better for our customers.

“You need to be sure that your vendors are giving you the support that you are paying for at the same time that your customers are getting the support they are paying for. 4me allows you to take that chain from end to end, measuring it and producing real-time reporting to help you to manage and know the support that you are being given and that you are giving.”

 

OneLogin, a user perspective

A brief look at OneLogin and what user identity management means for users

Managing your day-to-day apps

When rolling out any new technology across a business, it is vital to think about how the user of your chosen technology will interact with it and what it will mean for their daily working lives. We thought it would be helpful to write a series of articles on how the user interacts with some of the technology that we sell and support.

OneLogin is, in essence, a powerful tool for single sign-in user authentication, app management and account security. So, other than the clear benefits that this offers to the IT team, what can users expect when they are working for an organisation that deploys OneLogin?

The key thing that users will notice is that they will log in just once – to the OneLogin portal instance of the company that they work for. Once logged in, they will then be able to see a dashboard of icons for all the apps that they are allowed to access for their day-to-day work. The beauty here is that they then only need to click on the app icon to gain immediate access – no more entering different usernames and passwords. Needless to say, this is a great boost for the user as they can get on with their day rather than having to worry about passwords and login info for every app. What is more, you can receive access to a new app from the moment that IT adds it to your OneLogin dashboard.

Simpler and more secure

OneLogin is particularly useful when you require access to many different applications from different suppliers or if your supplier requires you to log in to different tools individually. Security is also improved, given that there is only one account to maintain or reset if needs be. From a user perspective, you still only have to worry about one username and password, which is a great thing for the user and a great thing for IT as well!

Learn more about OneLogin 

 

Business Service Management

Refocusing Service Management for the whole business

Delivering service management is no longer just the responsibility of IT

As the needs of the business, its staff, customers, partners and suppliers grows, so too do the demands on service provision. In a stripped back and simplified way, IT has been able to deliver quality service management to company staff and even customers. The problem is that as the number of groups requiring service has grown, the complexity of the requirements themselves has increased. Repackaging the service desk as a one-size-fits-all strategy will not lead to satisfied customers and will undoubtedly lead to a perception of inefficiency.

The pitfalls of delivering service to more and more people

Service management has been presented in many guises to cater for the increasing demands – Help Desk, Service Desk, ITSM and Customer Service Management to name but a few. The problem has always been that vendors have repurposed an existing approach to IT service and rolled this out to other business functions or departments. For example, if HR wanted to offer services to staff, IT would deploy a version of its existing tool with logging, self-service and so on. This would usually involve a separate instance of the tool, which may not be integrated well with the IT instance. The results are obvious – increased complexity for the management of the tools and increased costs to the business.

It is important to highlight that none of this is IT’s fault. Vendors have not made it easy for the IT team to solve complex service issues and instead have been repurposing existing approaches and technologies. What business needs is a more connected and integrated approach.

Removing the barriers to collaboration

Having a service management tool that enables internal, external and supplier collaboration is great, but different departments and individual staff will be using other tools to communicate, collaborate and share data on a daily basis. Using apps to improve collaboration and the overall service experience helps but there are often issues with security and access. Attempts to integrate these apps can be tricky and costly. This can often lead IT to limit the apps that staff can use, making the department unpopular and stifling collaboration and productivity.

Business Service Management is one approach to solving these issues. BSM is not a single product, it is a unification of the best technologies to support the whole business through service management, integrated apps and user security. For example, Revo combines its service management tool, 4me, with Cloudpipes to help to manage all the app integrations that your organization will need. These are accessed via OneLogin, to provide a high level of security. All the apps and integrations are managed and controlled centrally and accessed by users through a single login.

When delivered correctly, BSM enables internal, external and supplier collaboration rather than stifling it.

Go beyond Service Management and ITSM by offering open service delivery with BSM.