Approaches to the choice of Service Desk: self-written, free, specialized or professional ?!

The question of automating the work of technical support comes before any company with a staff of 100 people or more. User appeals are becoming too numerous to not be registered in any way. After the task of recording appeals from external customers or internal users is solved, the ideas of a service-oriented approach, SLA control (parameters of service provision), asset management, resource planning, labor accounting, contract management, loyalty increase, etc. appear. Another reason for automation is, of course, the simplicity of ensuring the organization's scalable growth, for example, by the number of external contracts or supported employees.



After interviewing more than 400 customers, Forrester analysts found that, on average, 30% are unhappy with the ITSM solutions used in their company. At the same time, among those who use SaaS solutions, only 12% are dissatisfied.
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We like these statistics, but we cannot be completely objective on this issue. A year ago, we presented our cloud Service Desk solution ITSM365 , created on the basis of the industrial platform Naumen Service Desk . On the other hand, our team has been engaged in ITSM solutions for more than 10 years, which allows us to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of various classes of such solutions. We offer the vision of the ITSM365 team at the Service Desk solutions, their categorization and comparison criteria applicable for companies with small IT services (up to 25 IT specialists). In large companies, the criteria and categories will differ significantly.

Compare various categories of ITSM solutions

1 - poor / not optimal, 2 - moderate, 3 - good / optimal

Categorizing ITSM Solutions

When developing the categories, we intentionally avoided trying to group the solutions:

• by functionality, because it produces quite fine lines, and there are too many places for disputes and discussions that are far from the essence of comparison
• on orientation to the final client. Here, it is possible to single out solutions that are oriented to the work of external support services and to the internal IT service.
• By the number of users or IT professionals, that for small and medium-sized businesses in general is meaningless.

In companies with an IT staff of 7 to 25 people, the tasks and level of maturity of the IT service are about the same. Companies with fewer IT professionals practically do not use IT automation tools.
As a result, after studying the Service Desk for SMB market, we received the following categorization:

• Samopisnye solutions . The idea of ​​doing everything on your own and “perfect” is still visited by company and IT management. In large companies, this approach may even be justified for truly unique processes. IT automation based on ITIL / ITSM practices is not one of the unique processes. Moreover, these best practices are already embedded in automation tools and their use increases the level of maturity of IT services. If a small company “on the knee” tries to automate existing processes, then there is no improvement in the work from this practice, unless, of course, the tasks of an entirely basic level of automation are not at stake. Moreover, in such projects there are great risks of dependence on specific performers who usually leave behind neither documentation nor the source codes of the bicycle invented.
• Open Source Service Desk . This is a large class of solutions, some of which originated precisely as self-written solutions for specific companies. A very attractive side of Open Source solutions is the free products themselves. However, in many cases it is difficult to pay for it, the complexity of implementation, the need for consultants who are familiar with the product, lack of support or localization. The problem, which is often forgotten when considering and choosing these solutions, is that a large number of such products, developed with bare enthusiasm, "die" when this same enthusiasm is exhausted. In addition, the developers of such solutions often do not optimize the code to work with a serious scale of automation and a large number of users. All this will certainly affect in 3-4 years or less. It all depends on the growth rate of your business.
• Specialized solutions. In this category we have included all commercial Help Desk / Service Desk / ITSM solutions for small and medium businesses. Small business solutions usually cover a small number of ITIL processes, but on the other hand, automation of the widest range of tasks of a small IT service is usually built into such products.
• Professional solutions developed on an industrial platform . Corporate solutions created for large businesses that are adapted for the small and medium business segment. Such products offer automation of a large number of ITSM processes and the ability to scale as the company grows. There is no risk of exhaustion of the enthusiasm of developers, but there are a large number of references of users of the platform. One of the main ways that makes an expensive corporate platform accessible to small businesses is to provide access to the platform using the SaaS model. With this approach, the need to purchase expensive licenses immediately disappears. Our solution ITSM365 belongs to this category, because it is based on the platform Naumen Service Desk.

Criteria for comparing ITSM solutions for small businesses

In a large company, choosing a solution can be a very difficult task. When comparing offers from different vendors, hundreds of different criteria can be taken into account. If the company does not have the ability to allocate a team of IT specialists for this task, then some simple and transparent set of criteria is required. A good example of such criteria is given by the SMART method for setting problems, where

• S (specific) - specific;
• M (measurable) measurable;
• A (attainable) achievable;
• R (relevant) significant;
• T (time-bounded) correlated with a specific term.

Based on this methodology, we propose a similar set of criteria for comparing ITSM solutions. Once again we recall that these criteria are distanced from the consideration of functionality:

• ITIL compliance . In ITIL collected experience of the best practices of various companies. Yes, for small businesses, many ITIL processes are redundant and their automation is not necessary. ITIL, on the other hand, is the de facto standard for IT service management. Today, any IT service, regardless of whether it is aware of its management and employees, is built on the principles of a service approach. So, if we want to improve the quality of work with user requests to the IT service as a result of the automation of the Service Desk, then we must immediately focus on the best examples of the IT organization. In this case, this is our specific (specific) criterion that determines the main task of the project.
• The total cost of development and implementation in the range of 2-3 years . Every time we want to invent a bicycle, it is necessary to compare its quantitative and qualitative indicators with what is already on the market. In small companies, it is often forgotten that people also cost money and for several years the cost of an employee who works on a project more than exceeds the cost of almost any automation tool. At the same time, finding and replacing an employee is a much more difficult task than choosing or rejecting any product.
• Development / maintenance costs. ITSM solutions cannot be implemented once - changes, development of new processes, increasing the level of maturity of IT services, business growth and new tasks for its development - all this is inherent in the very principle of building an ITIL approach. In the same category of costs should include technical support solutions, the introduction of new functionality and the deployment of updates. In analyzing the costs of development and maintenance, it is important to consider both infrastructure costs and the costs of staff training.

These two criteria give us the capital and operating costs of the project, so there is no separate “Cost” criterion among those considered. This is our main M (measurable) measurable criterion.

• Confidence in the result. Under this criterion, we combined all possible risks of the final result. How likely is the successful completion of the implementation project? In any new development there is always a chance of failure, if you try to independently deal with an unfamiliar product built according to a new methodology for you, then the probability of failure is also quite high. On average, every sixth IT project fails . On the other hand, if the solution is tested, tested and used by other companies in your industry and the vendor’s support team is on your side, then the chances of success increase significantly. This criterion determines the attainability of A (attainable) of the final result.
• Scalable. At the stage of choosing the Service Desk, and any other solution, many SMB companies do not think about the prospects for 2-3 years. At the same time, successful small businesses are companies that grow very quickly. When choosing a solution, the question arises of how ready it is for higher loads. How the product will behave, and how much it will cost if the number of users and the number of registered requests increase several times or even several orders of magnitude. Changes in workload can be associated with the growth of the organization itself, or with the desire to use software “to the fullest”, for example, by automating the work of non-IT service departments using Service Desk . The same criterion includes the possibility of expanding the functionality of a solution to automate a wider range of tasks. This is our version of the significant criterion R (relevant) - how long the implemented solution will remain relevant for the company, is it not to happen that it will need to be replaced before the start of commercial operation.
• The speed of implementation. This criterion, perhaps, is one of the key when choosing solutions for small businesses and, especially, for service companies for which the Service Desk solution is business critical. The speed of implementation - the time from the signing of the contract / payment to the beginning of work in the decision in the framework of interest processes. Note that the speed of implementation and fast results (Fast Win) are an important factor for a new IT director or manager, for whom it is important to show their achievements by a certain date, for example, by the end of the year. In our interpretation of SMART criteria, this is the T (time-bounded) time factor.

How we evaluated different ITSM solutions for small businesses

• Samopisnye solutions . We are skeptical about the possibilities of developing a full Service Desk solution by the staff of a small company. Yes, the task to automate the registration of tickets does not seem difficult, but already at the stage of transition from registration of tickets to incident management, in our experience, problems begin. Moreover, one cannot be sure that the employees will be able to realize all their plans within the specified time limits. As a result, the company instead of the cost of buying ready-made software pays employees who are engaged in development - the longer the project lasts, the more expensive the final product.
• Open Source Service Desk . All savings on licenses in such solutions, turns into the cost of implementation and maintenance of the product. In order to implement and maintain any Open Source solution, you will need a specialist in this company on your staff. Most likely, you will not be able to attract such a specialist from the side for a permanent job, so it remains either to contact the consultants or to educate and train yourself. Both options range between long or expensive. On the other hand, ITIL processes in such products are implemented quite in line with the best ITIL practices, so if everything worked for you, it worked correctly. Note that among the dozens of customers who chose ITSM365, the majority migrated with Open Source and self-written solutions.
• Specialized solutions. In this category, good products with a reasonable price for small and medium businesses. If you calculate the cost of licenses and implementation, then it is likely that such a solution will cost you less than an Open Source product. By the time you move to full-fledged use of a professional product, a handwritten solution can at best show the alpha version or the first prototypes. The most difficult stage in such projects is the implementation, the results of which depend entirely on the team of consultants who carry it out.
• Professional solutions developed on an industrial platform . We attributed our product ITSM365 here and the ratings were due to objective reasons. The fact is that for vendors producing such products, each individual implementation is too insignificant compared to the introduction of the company's main product in order to waste the efforts of the company's consultants. Hence the conclusion that the introduction of such a product should be simplified and accelerated as much as possible by offering ready-made templates, an understandable sequence of steps, tips and other means facilitating the project. As a result, in ITSM365 the first application can be registered in a few minutes after receiving access. In addition, in ITSM365, as in other SaaS products, there are no capital costs at all. You pay for the solution, only while using it and to the extent that you need it. Finally, the ITIL processes in ITSM365 are on the same level as the main platform Naumen Service Desk.

If you do not agree with the categorization or think that we have missed some criteria, then unsubscribe in the comments!