Benefits

CA Service Desk Manager is a key component of a comprehensive, enterprisewide incident and problem management solution. A vital weapon in the battle against incidents threatening critical business functions, it improves the speed and accuracy with which issues are resolved, leading to better quality service and response times — all while reducing support costs.

The CA Advantage

CA Service Desk Manager improves IT support management by providing a comprehensive, highly versatile set of functionality that leverages ITIL® principles and other best practices and improves IT governance. CA Service Desk Manager is a critical component of effective incident and problem management, and is an important part of CA’s overall approach to the Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision, which helps you unify and simplify IT management across your enterprise.

CA Service Desk Manager: Resolve IT Problems Faster

IT budgets have been under constant cost-cutting pressure for years, even as demand for around-the-clock access to business-critical support services grows at an exponential rate. Add the increased complexity of global IT service demands, disparate information silos and varied hardware and software components, and it’s no surprise that incident and problem
management processes have become increasingly complex and difficult to administer.

They’re even harder if your support procedures are performed manually, or make use of loosely defined processes or spreadsheets to log, track and escalate incidents, or if your service desk analysts have limited visibility into the components that make up your IT infrastructure, the relationships and interdependencies. But without a full understanding of the entire IT
environment, it’s challenging to determine the source of incidents and service outages.

Further complicating matters are the information silos that persist despite your best efforts to integrate them. When a home-grown application, one inherited through mergers and acquisitions or enterprise applications with their own built-in support packages do not fully integrate, the information islands that form fail to give your support staff the comprehensive view into the enterprise they need to identify, isolate and resolve incidents and problems.

Meeting Service Demands

Yet, you still must deliver on several key mandates and improve service quality while controlling support costs. However, if systems are down and service disruptions are the norm, end users can’t perform at their peak, productivity drops and overall business performance suffers.

On the other hand, if these challenges are addressed and overcome, your IT organization can enhance end-user productivity and proactively support the key technology requirements of the business through adoption of industry-proven best practices for incident, problem and change management.

That’s why CA Service Desk Manager and its fully integrated suite of features — including service desk, knowledge management, support automation, dashboard and the CA Configuration Management Database (CMDB) — is so important in helping you achieve effective incident and problem management.

Key Features

• Tools to automate incident detection, diagnosis and repair, while enabling cost-effective live support and self-service capabilities
• Graphical views offering insight into the effectiveness of service desk operations, historical data and the status of current incidents, tickets, requests, change orders and more
• A comprehensive view of current IT service configurations that helps streamline change management processes
• A browser-based interface that allows end users, analysts and administrators to save implementation time and maintenance efforts
• Out-of-the box best practices, including incident, problem and change management, for a level of service desk management and control that helps align IT processes with business objectives
• A comprehensive notification mechanism that keeps everyone in the organization updated via emails, faxes or online alerts, ensuring a quick response to open issues and helping provide good customer service
• A central authority (LDAP and Active Directory), letting the network database verify a user’s identity and access to the service desk, simplifying implementation and maintenance, while improving adherence to security standards
• Comprehensive knowledge management functionality, including authoring, retention, retrieval, notification and lifecycle management
• FAQs featuring patented “bubble up” technology that allows end users to find solutions to questions based on categories ranked by frequency of use
• One integrated knowledge base to support all related functionality, enabling simplified administration
• Decision trees that guide multi-step procedural tasks and help end users arrive at the appropriate solution
• Repair tools that retrieve diagnostic information about the end user’s computer instantly and accurately, and deploy proven fixes
• Resolution scripts that operate without end-user intervention
• Background repair that lets end users keep working while IT solves their problems
• Intelligent workflow capabilities that optimize service desk processes
• Live chat and desktop sharing for remote interaction between support technicians and end users
• Intelligent support workflow that optimizes service desk processes with queuing and advanced security
• Customizable, extensive reporting that captures detailed summary data and filters it by various means, including queue, technician role and user type
• Fully Integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB)