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Third Sky "Insights" Newsletter
October 28, 2005

"Insights" is a quarterly newsletter of practical suggestions for getting the most out of your IT Service Management or CRM investment.

Table of Contents:

Topics for Everyone:

A Letter from the CEO
Industry Trends - IT Service Management Overview
How to Get Started with ITSM
Management Reporting - The Future Phase That Never Seems to Happen

Topics for iET Customers:

On-call Schedule (ITSM/Helpdesk)
Order Status (CRM)
Tech Tips for Admins
Automatic Dashboard Refresh

A Letter from the CEO
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Third Sky's "Insights". Over the years, we have compiled a wealth of experience helping companies establish best-in-class IT initiatives. While our focus is IT Service Management, our talented personnel have delivered innovative solutions in the areas of Help Desk, Research Compliance, Customer Relationship Management, Custom Software Development, and Mobile Solutions. This newsletter is presented to our valued community of executives, partners, and clients to share the tips, tricks, and "insights" we've developed from working with you.

In addition to the articles you'll find in this newsletter, we'd like to invite you to take advantage of some of our other new offerings:

Again, welcome to "Insights". We hope you find it a useful source of information on both the marketplace and Third Sky. We hope the rest of 2005 is rewarding for all of you.

Sincerely,

Joshua Sky Barrow
President and CEO
Third Sky, Inc.

Industry Trends - IT Service Management Overview

Over the last 3 years North America has become more and more aware of IT Service Management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Three years ago a small percentage of our customers and prospects were aware of ITIL and even smaller percentages were planning on adopting any of it. Today you can't escape ITSM and ITIL as industry topics. The software vendors have all embraced these concepts, trade shows and interest groups have sprung up everywhere, and ITIL is effectively becoming an ISO standard with ISO20000.

ITSM is fundamentally applying customer relationship management principles to IT. Service Level Management as a process is where this becomes the most obvious. The transformation of Help Desks into Service Desks is another area as well. IT departments are starting to realize that they need to better align themselves with the business, and what better way to do this than to treat the rest of the business as customers they provide services to.

ITSM's growing popularity and ITIL's adoption as a framework can be explained by a number of factors. Best practices adoption and standards adoption in and of itself is a reason. The drive to improve IT's reputation within an organization and using ITSM as a means of doing so is another factor. The associated KPIs and process controls that come with the ITIL framework is another reason. Whatever an organization's reason for embracing ITSM and/or ITIL, the amount of change required to do this properly is immense. An ITSM initiative is best done in a series of small steps of closely managed change.

ITSM looks like it is here to stay. It is a common sense approach to managing IT. ITIL, COBIT, ISO20000, and a variety of other frameworks or standards lay out some best practices and process guidelines, but the fundamental shift is the shift of the IT culture to a service-oriented culture.

At Third Sky we have positioned ourselves as an advisor to you through this shift. We have assembled a series of service offerings to address the people, process, and technology challenges within ITSM. Our education, process consulting, and technology solutions offerings are tightly integrated and enable us to provide a comprehensive set of services that effect change. Visit www.thirdsky.com to learn more about how we can help you.

How to Get Started with ITSM

Most articles I come across encourage organizations to start with the Service Desk, defining a Service Catalog and automating Incident Management and layering on Problem Management, Change Management, and other processes from this starting point. While this provides immediate benefits for struggling help desks, we have observed transition issues with this approach.

First and foremost most help desks use a ticket tracking system with an overly complicated categorization mechanism for tickets. They "Type Trees" often contain a mixture of incident types, hardware information, and enterprise application references. Moving from this reference scheme to a true Service Catalog is a challenge. It becomes even more challenging when a quality Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is not in place. Help desks lose their ability to reference system information in the incident management process. Based on our experience we have begun to recommend one of two approaches.

Our ideal approach is to establish a proper CMDB before making any changes at the help desk or service desk level. Take the time to do a full inventory. Establish relationships between configuration items and fully understand the infrastructure that needs to be managed. Where possible, build integration points with monitoring software to make the maintenance of the CMDB less of an issue. After a proper CMDB has been established with good configuration management procedures, then mapping a service catalog, defining the other service support processes, and implementing software to automate these processes becomes much more effective and an easier change for an organization to manage.

When immediate action is needed at the service desk level, a CMDB consisting of the primary enterprise applications and key pieces of hardware infrastructure should be established. This alternate approach allows for a service catalog to be created with a true separation from configuration information. Remember, configuration information has relationships to services, but the services provided should be abstracted from configuration data.

Third Sky can provide you a good white paper on modeling services. Third Sky has real world experience building service catalogs and configuration management databases. If you could use help with these concepts, contact us at sales@thirdsky.com. We'd be happy to share more detailed tips with you as requested.

Management Reporting - The Future Phase That Never Seems to Happen

We can't tell you how many times we've seen customers put off critical reporting requirements to a future phase of a technology initiative and then never get around to addressing this critical issue. Many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands are invested on software and consulting services and at the end of the day the information managers need to make decisions and run their operations is still not made readily available. When it comes to trend analysis and understanding where the underlying process issues lie, most organizations are even further away from having the tools they need.

We can't stress enough to our customers how important investing in reporting is. Defining KPIs and metrics you want to manage your operation to are critical to realizing the promised returns on your software investments. When you undertake an initiative, be sure to invest in defining reports. Yes, they can wait until after the initial go-live, but the commitment to build and deploy them must be there to avoid the pitfall of having them slip into that elusive 'future phase'.

Third Sky has a reporting effectiveness audit designed to help our customers evaluate their current reporting solutions, define best practice metrics, and where appropriate help implement the proper reports. If this is of interest to you contact us at sales@thirdsky.com.

On-call Schedule (ITSM/Helpdesk)

It's a high priority incident. It must be escalated immediately. Who should the Servicedesk/Helpdesk page? Was last week's on-call rep the same as this week? Is this one of the groups that passes the pager around or does each person have their own pager?

Critical time can be lost as the Servicedesk/Helpdesk searches for the right on-call rep to page, or worse still, pages the wrong person.

Third Sky has helped ITSM customers implement an elegant solution for tracking the on-call rep schedule.

Each group is given access to their own on-call rep schedule screen where they can specify the start date/time and end date/time for their on-call rep. This allows groups to specify their on-call rep weeks and months in advance.

Third Sky adds notifications to lookup the on-call rep schedule. Notifications then send the page via the pager's SMTP email address.

The benefits of on-call scheduling include

Servicedesk/Helpdesk no longer need to scramble to find who to page
Support groups maintain their own paging schedule. This took a tremendous burden off the Servicedesk/Helpdesk since they no longer needed to track who was on-call.
By using Notification, the paging is automatically audited.

Order Status (CRM)

What is the status of my order? This is one of the most common questions customers ask sales reps and customer service reps.

Third Sky recommends integrating CRM with your order system, fulfillment system or ERP system. The Account and/or Opportunity screen is modified to show a new "Order Status" tab. The tab shows a grid of orders, i.e. order number, order dates, status, total dollars, etc. If the user double-clicks on the grid, a pop-up window appears showing the order line item details.

Some of Third Sky's customers are taking order information a step further. They have hand-held devices for their field sales forces that lets them lookup account, contact and opportunity information while they are on the road. Order information is also added to the hand held.

The benefits of order status integration include:

Quickly answer the customer's question so you can move them to the next topic, i.e. ask them for the next sale.
Sales reps and customer service reps are empowered to help solve customer order/fulfillment problems since they have access to status information
Greater professionalism and customer service

Tech Tips for Admins

How do you pass a date from iET to Crystal Reports?

iET provides the capacity to pass a numeric value to a blank function in Crystal Reports that has the same name as the field. Since only numeric values can be passed, you can take a date such as 10/01/2005 and convert it to a number like 20051001, pass it to Crystal Reports, and then break it apart.

For example, lets say the date that was passed was stored in @ date_param. The Crystal Reports function to parse the date would be:

Local StringVar strDateParam;

strDateParam := ToText({@date_param}, "#");

If Length(strDateParam) = 8 Then

DateTime(ToNumber(Mid(strDateParam,1,4)), ToNumber(Mid(strDateParam,2,2)), ToNumber(mid(strDateParam,6,2)),0,0,0);

Thanks goes to Ken Michelson, Management Consultant for Third Sky, for this Tech Tip. If you have questions about this tip, you can email Ken at kmichelson@thirdsky.com.

Automatic Dashboard Refresh

Lot's of customers have asked us how to get the Dashboards to refresh periodically like a query. Third Sky has the solution! It requires a custom java class, which we have written, and some customizations to the Dashboard with hidden fields. Since implementing this feature is somewhat involved, we are offering it to our Pay-as-you-go Consulting Support customers. Please contact sales@thirdsky.com to request this enhancement.

If you are not part of our Pay-as-you-go Consulting Support program, join now! This program goes way beyond the phone and email support provided by iET. Benefits include:

Deep technical support for your system administrator. Excellent for addressing your complex customization questions.
Access the experts that have years of experience implementing and customizing iET.
Best practice advice. Got a question about ITIL or CRM? We can help.
Backlogged with enhancement requests from users? Use Pay-as-you-go to quickly implement your high priority enhancements to keep your user happy.
Consulting support can include remote access or even onsite support

There's no commitment. You only need to pay for what you use. Contact sales@thirdsky.com for more information.

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