Verso ITSM Blog

Cloud computing is the real buzz in Service Management, there is lots of talk of “Cloud sourcing” your service desk as the next big thing.  So is it really all it is cracked up to be?

I am always sceptical of the hype that goes around each new miracle in Service management, but I do feel that the cloud really does have something to offer....it brings the ability to utilise sophisticated Service Management tools into the realm of possibility for those small and medium businesses (SMBs) that could not have considered an investment in these, often very expensive, software solutions previously.
Now even a single person service desk can take advantage of the benefits of using a full service IT Service Management (ITSM) Toolset with no infrastructure outlay or setup costs.  This means that the smallest operations can readily use ITIL based processes with minimal set up and configuration effort.
Individual departments within larger corporations can also benefit from putting their service into the cloud, whereas previously they would, in all probability, have been tied to using whatever platform was being deployed in-house for service desk operations, they can now look for a solution that suits their unique needs and pay the minimal monthly costs to subscribe to the service.  No long term ties, no capital investment....a pretty easy sell to management.
moving to a world-class, Cloud-based service desk or help desk can:
• quickly reduce your costs
• improve your customer satisfaction immediately
• provide the means for your customers to solve their own issues using self-service tools
• Allow for simple and fast uptake of best practice in ITSM and ITIL processes
• dramatically reduce infrastructure costs associated with an in-house Service Desk application
• Allow for fast and highly cost-effective compliance regulatory requirements
• Achieve fast return on investment (ROI) through rapid deployment
We can offer you a free trial on our SerioPlus Service Desk so you can see the power of operating in the Cloud for yourself.  Just send an email to and we will get you up and running with SerioPlus.
Serio have an interesting blog on the Cloud here
Watch out for more information on service in the cloud as we explore security and other concerns about this operating environment.

Serio 6 is coming, and you might be surprised at what it is going to offer you!

The Serio team have been working very hard all year to bring you Serio 6.  This is the biggest release that Serio has done since the product was launched in 1997.  It represents a huge change in the way the product is configured.
One of the most exiciting aspects is that it will allow us to host your service desk system on our own servers, freeing up your hardware, taking away the responsibility for backing the system up and making configuration simply a matter of installing Serio Client on your machine.
We are doing this by changing the way Serio Server works, it will now be a web server.  For more details on how this will affect your Serio installation check out the serio blog here.
Send an email to if you want to find out more. 

My next few posts will be for Serio users.  Serio is a powerful ITSM toolset and when I go onsite with customers I often realise that they are not using the tool to their full advantage.  In the coming days I am going to explore some of the features you may not be aware of.

Serio Remote Desktop - you are probably aware that you can use Serio to take control of your customers’ desktops and quickly resolve issues remotely.  Serio requires that your customers are aware that you will be taking control and they need to click a button to allow that to happen.
But did you know that there is another version of the remote desktop tool designed for servers that does not require a response from a user? 
I was recently onsite with a customer and found that they were having to go into their (rather chilly and cramped) server room to work on the server consoles.  We installed the unattended version of the Serio Remote Desktop on all their servers and they are now able to do this work from the comfort of their own desks.  The remote desktop is an application which is included in all installations of Serio, there is not additional charge for its use, so have a look and see if it can make your job a bit easier.
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Apollo 13 by Gaming Works

I am a great proponent of ITIL simulation games, I have attended workshops at a number of conferences where these games, normally in a shortened version have been presented.  The premise is - in a very small nutshell - that you are put into a real-life situation and use ITIL processes to get the best end result you can.

Having attended a number of the different presentations, the one that made the biggest impression was the Apollo 13 game from Gaming Works.  Apart from the fact that building, launching and ultimately brining a rocket ship back to earth, albeit via simulation, really appeals to the Geek in me - the game really bought home the advantages that good design and application of Service Management principles can give you when dealing with unexpected events.

Rather than me trying to explain the game in long and boring detail, have a look at this video from Gaming Works, it will give you a better idea of the value of the game than I can put into words! 

If you are interested in running the simulation for your business, send us an email to and one of our consultants will be in touch.

Just what does ITIL “Compliant” mean when we are talking about Service Desk Software? In my opinion, absolutely nothing!

This is one of my pet hates, and you won’t find anywhere on this website a claim that the Serio Software is “ITIL Compliant” because there is no such thing. 

Our aim is for the Serio software to support your processes by providing a high level of configurability. I like to think that if you have designed a reasonable process for your incident, problem, change or configuration mangement (or any other ITIL based processes), then you should be able to configure Serio to support these processes.

ITIL is not something you can “comply” with, the framework offers you guidance on what is good practice for IT Service Management processes. 

Pink Elephant provides a service which assesses IT Service Management software and gives it their “tick” if they believe it supports the ITIL framework, but they do not state that any software is ITIL Compliant, their Pink Verify service indicates that a toolset is capable of supporting the basic ITIL processes.

The only space where Compliance becomes a reality is when you are looking at ISO20000 - but compliance with this standard is not something that you will achieve simply by selecting a toolset that claims to be compliant, there is so much more to it than that....watch out for future posts on ISO20000.

I guess what I am trying to say is that you should take any claims of ITIL compliance from toolset vendors with a grain of salt, I would love to hear your feedback on this.... 

I don’t think there is anyone in the IT Service Management world who would argue the importance of the Service Catalogue, but just where do you start?

I liken the business Service Catalogue to a restaurant menu.  You have a choice of items you can select:

• Steak and Chips
• Fish of the Day
• Coffee

For each of these choices there will then be some further decisions you need to make - how do you want your steak cooked? Do you want sauce with the chips? How is the Fish of the Day cooked? What sort of coffee do you want - latte, filter, flat white, capuccino?

Underlying the customer facing menu are the recipes - the equivalent of the Technical Services Catalogue.  The customer, with a few exceptions, does not need to view the recipe just as, in the ITSM world, the customer does not need to know what underlying services make up the Service they are purchasing.

Going down a further layer will bring us to the CMDB - in the case of the restaurant this will consist of the individual ingredients for the dishes, the pots and pans, the utensils - all the components that are needed to create your meal.

Underpinning the restaurant menu we need to have a Service Level agreement.  In the case of a restaurant this may not be explicitly conveyed in the menu, but you can be assured that the customer will have certain expectations.  No matter how perfect the steak is that you serve to them, if they have had to wait 2 hours for it they will not be happy with the service provided.

Moving back to the IT environment, let’s consider a customer purchasing an email service from their IT Service Provider.  It is not going to be enough to say they want email - where do they want it? Exclusively on their desktop PC? On their laptop in the office or connected to a home network? On a laptop with a roaming wireless connection? On a PDA or mobile phone?  Each of these options will have cost and technical considerations.

Receiving email on a laptop with a roaming wireless connection is going to use more than one underlying technical service and multiple CIs - you will be looking at an Exchange Server, Spam filtering, proxy servers, file storage, back-up services, wireless connectivity, anti virus software, firewall.....the list is long, but the customer does not want, or need to know that.  What they want is spam and virus free email delivered to their laptop wherever they are in the world.

My normal approach is to start looking at the Service Catalogue from a top down view. Define the customer facing services and then start to detail the underlying technical services that make up these services.  The KISS principle should certainly be applied to the creation of a Business Service Catalogue - Keep it simple, stupid, for example, don’t offer your customer virus protection as a Service, that should be an underlying technical service for the email and internet services.

These layers, along with the Service Pipeline and your Retired Services make up the Service Portfolio.

I will talk more about the creation of your Service Catalogue and Service Portfolio in upcoming posts.  In the meantime if you want to see a simple template for a Service Level catalogue, drop me a line at

Continual Service Improvement is a crucial part of the ITIL lifecycle. Success of CSI requires metrics, but some organisations just don’t seem to know where to stop when gathering data.

The statement “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is true, but equally you need to consider the idea that “if you are not going to act, don’t bother measuring.”
I see many businesses where a huge effort is put into gathering data, analysing it and then producing pretty graphical reports which are printed, emailed and otherwise distributed to various parties. Too often that is as far as it goes, these reports will often go straight into the round filing cabinet under the desk, or into the deleted items folder. If they are read, presented at meetings or distributed to management they may be examined, discussed...but is any action taken as a result of the information that contributes to improvements in your IT Service Management processes and performance?
A huge amount of effort goes into the collection, formatting and distribution of these reports, too often these reports are either never used, or are used but not acted upon.
Don’t get me wrong, measuring is absolutely crucial to a successfull Service Improvement initiative, but think carefully about just what you are going to be able to do with the information you are collecting. Is it going to provide you with anything that can be acted upon - and even more importantly, do you have the resources to make changes if they are required. Our current economic climate means that many IT Departments are running at full capacity with no ability to acquire new resources.
I would suggest that you look at the current list of reports that you are providing and ask yourself what has been done as a result of the information contained in these reports - if the answer is “nothing” then you need to consider whether the effort involved in compiling and then examining these reports is warranted.
SerioReports offers a wide range of reports that is adequate for most reporting requirements, we are also able to supply you with the tools needed to produce your own custom reports in your own reporting tools. 

This is something I have been thinking about for a while - having a husband working in Fleet maintenance and struggling with being able to provide an appropriate service to the end users has made me wonder why we keep the ITIL lifecycle tucked up in our little IT world. 

I guess we could argue that fleet maintenance is today really an IT function as most modern fleets use computer diagnosis - my formerly computer illiterate-husband now happily plugs a laptop into massive pieces of machinery to pinpoint errors and when my car goes in for a service it is connected to the diagnostic computer before any work is done.  IT is everywhere now, in all apects of “Service” so has the IT in ITSM become redundant? I think it has.

We limit the involvement of other parts of the business world by using the “IT” part of the title - “IT” conjures up visions of the stereotypical glasses-wearing “geek” inhabiting the basements of corporations around the world (check out “The IT Crowd” to see the vision the rest of the world has of “IT"). Therefore when someone sees “IT” as part of the title of an organisation or framework, they are likely to think - “That doesn’t interest me - I’m not one of those IT people.”

Going back to the discussion I was having with my husband on Fleet maintenance, it was clear that they have problems - at the grass-roots level - in deciding what to do first.  There are the simple service requests for machinery which has done a certain number of hours and needs its regular maintenance; then there are minor faults such as blown bulbs, seats that won’t adjust, airconditioning that is not working properly (although in an underground mine that is a bit more than a minor inconvenience); and then there are the show-stoppers - major pieces of equipment which break down and stop production - often at a cost of 100s of 1000s of dollars each hour.  Prioritisation of these seems to be a bit haphazard, the fitters involved don’t have any SLA targets to work towards, the most important jobs are easy to work out, but beneath that there is little guidance.  This doesn’t apply just to the company he currently works for, he has had 30+ years in the industry and the situation has been the same pretty well everywhere he has worked.  If there is any priorisation applied it does not feed down to the people actually doing the work.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the current relevence of “IT” in ITSM, is it a redundant acronym in today’s technology driven world, is there any part of the business where Service is not driven or at least enabled by IT?

On another note - I have had an interesting few days attending the IPESC (International Publications Executive Sub-Committee) meeting in Paris. As a journalist in a previous life (pre-IT) publications is an area that is high on my list of priorities, we achieved some good work over the two day meeting, and Paris in summer is not a bad place to be. I even managed to spend a day at EuroDisney, an interesting experience with no children in tow.

We are very pleased to launch our new website today, versosolutions.com was well overdue for a facelift, so we hope you like the new look.

In this blog we will aim to discuss topics of interest in the IT Service Management world, and we welcome your input into these discussions.

We will also be using these pages to give you hints and tips to help Serio users to get the best value out of the toolset.

With my own interest in publications you can expect quite a bit of discussion on this topic in this blog - I am currently the Endorsement Officer on IPESC (International Publications Executive Sub Committee), an ITSMF International sub committee charged with the job of ensuring that books carrying the ITSMF logo are up to the expected quality and provide valuable information to the ITSMF community.

I hope that you will find this blog interesting, thought provoking and that you will contribute your own thoughts to the topics that spark your interest.

The New Zealand IT Service Management Forum held its annual conference at the Wellington Convention Centre from May12-14. 

Conference attendees were presented with a great range of high quality speakers, as usual the opportunity to network with others working in the ITSM field was invaluable.  Next year’s conference is also planned for Wellington in May 2009.  The next regional conference to look out for is the ITSMF Australia event being held in Melbourne in August of this year.