The value ITAM brings to the Service Desk

Best practice

The value ITAM brings to the Service Desk

22 September 2021

3 minute read

Whiteboard Wednesday Episode 23: The value ITAM brings to the Service Desk

Welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday, this week, what value can ITAM provide to the Service Desk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZbHYrIeUiA

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So, in a previous video, we spoke about incidents, problems and changes and this is the real heart of the service desk where we are logging incidents from the users or devices around the network, were identifying problems and managing them. Then we’re making necessary changes without risking the business, ITAM has real value to bring here.

How ITAM aids Incident, Problem and Change Management

Firstly, we have all these incidents coming in, the more I know about the users and the assets that I’m striving to support, the quicker and more efficiently I can support that user. It is like the doctor having the full case notes before making their diagnosis, the more he knows about you, the quicker he can make the diagnosis. The same is true of incident management. ITAM also helps with Problem Management; we can provide up-to-date configuration details if it’s needed. We can also identify once the problem has been identified, we can say, well, who else and what other assets or users have this similar configuration, and therefore, we can maybe identify it and stop that problem from occurring before it even happens. Proactive problem management.

De-risking Change Management

Finally, we can provide value to change management and help the Service Desk push through the changes with less risk. By means of example, let’s say that we had a lot of incidents around a certain app. The problem is identified, and we need to identify that we need to update the configuration of a server. But as a result of updating that server, we’re going to put the business at a million-dollar license exposure the next time the renewal comes through. Now maybe the best thing for the business is to push through that million-pound expense because that’s going to support the underlying service. But maybe it isn’t, but at least we can support the service desk in making the right decision at the time it’s being made.

ITAM and Service management working together:

There’s real value in ITAM and service management working together as partners. ITAM can bring a lot of business intelligence to service management to help them do their job more effectively, more efficiently. In return ITAM gets to work closely with a lot of the changes that are happening in the network. You can see them firsthand and tweak the processes here, tweak them there and work with service management to make sure that we’re getting our ITAM goals met. That’s just Incident, Problem and Change – there are loads of other processes within service management we can help to.

The value ITAM brings to the Service Desk