From the Service Desk Point of View

Integration and Automation Possibilities of LANDesk® Solutions

Solutions Don’t Reach Their Full Potential in Isolation A service management system can and should be the central nervous system that orchestrates IT service delivery to drive efficiency, reduce costs, manage risk, improve control, and increase productivity. To do this, it must be able to communicate with IT systems management, asset management, and other service management-related systems. Many organizations use different and sometimes incompatible systems across their IT groups and functions that are usually developed to solve discrete problems and are not designed to communicate with each other seamlessly or to share data effectively. However, the best designed incident, request, and change processes will never achieve their full potential if they rely on people to locate and interact with IT systems management, asset management, and service management components.

A service management solution cannot operate in total isolation. However, integration means different things to different people—data source integration, desktop management integration, directory services. All of these forms of integration and more are vital because without them, disparate systems create silos that prevent effective coordination and communication between groups, impede operational efficiency, and pose significant challenges for IT service desk managers. Important services—typically, but not exclusively IT services—must be delivered consistently and efficiently, restored quickly when interrupted, and managed as strategic assets. To track costs and standardize processes across the service environment, the service desk must be able to support an increasingly global customer base with a common approach, infrastructure, and data.

Benefits of Integration Today’s service desk solutions have the potential to dramatically improve decision accuracy, enhance productivity, increase efficiency, and reduce costs for organizations. To unlock this potential, services desk solutions require multi-layer integration with the underlying IT infrastructure, including the existing system and network management tools, key business applications, and personal productivity tools that can be used to integrate people, processes, and technology.

Core Integration Capabilities Integration brings together disparate systems and tools to diagnose and remedy issues, speed up IT actions and reaction, and create records from external sources. Integration allows for proactive monitoring of systems and issues that can be remedied before end user productivity is impacted. It also allows for incidents, requests, problems, and changes to be generated automatically from outside the base service desk. Users could click a simple button in SAP that could send problem details from SAP into the service desk and create an incident. Records can also be created from such external sources.

For example, can you identify installations of rogue software, gather facts about the operational costs per device, and control the release of software or patches? How do you manage undesired changes or identify infrastructure issues before users are affected?

LANDesk® Service Desk incorporates a powerful range of integration capabilities that enable you to connect easily with other systems within and beyond your business. Whether connecting to email, live data look ups, or even automatic generation of incidents from other systems, LANDesk makes it easy for you to bring together disparate systems and tools to speed IT actions and reactions, and avoid unnecessary risk through human error.

LANDesk Solutions Integration Data Source Integration Within any service desk environment, the ability to call on or see information such as user records, configuration items (CIs), and service levels is essential in order to take actions such as resolving incidents. Some of this data relies on the integration of external data sources. LANDesk Service Desk is delivered with built-in source connectors for systems management tools such as LANDesk® Management Suite and LANDesk® Asset Lifecycle Manager.

These connectors allow the service desk solution to both map and import acquired data into any point in LANDesk Service Desk and view the data live in these external sources from within LANDesk Service Desk. For example, data from scans by LANDesk Management Suite can be imported directly into the LANDesk configuration management database as CIs. This allows analysts to view status and activity information directly from LANDesk Service Desk.

Recognizing however that most organizations have already established a preferred database strategy, there are also connectors for the most common business data sources such as Novell ZENworks Configuration Management, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Active Directory, and Oracle. This ensures there is consistent and shared asset and CI data, not only in all LANDesk solutions but also across all federated data sources.

Of course, once connected, you can publish this data through self service, emails, dashboards, or RSS feeds, or into management information—turning your service desk into a publication point for all key business data.

In-Context Access In addition to the powerful data source integration described above, desktop management integration delivers in-context access to LANDesk Management Suite functions in LANDesk Service Desk. You can interface to LANDesk Management Suite from lists, incidents, problems, changes, or CIs. From here, you can access and run tools and functions such as remote control, VNC, software deployment, reboots, and patch deployment. What’s more, these actions are audited within LANDesk Service Desk and are equally possible from other leading management integration toolsets such as Microsoft SCCM and Novell ZENworks.

Other Integrations LANDesk Service Desk core integration allows direct connection between directory services applications such as Microsoft Active Directory or other directory services that allow connection using LDAP. Subject to the appropriate permissions, user data can be created, modified, and verified, and access rights can be established.

In addition, core integration enables external content to be embedded into the service desk interface, either as websites or published Web applications, delivering one-click access to your business along with mash-up views such as a user’s detail window that also contains a Google maps location.

There are a number of pre-built, third party-coded integration points that take the capabilities of LANDesk Service Desk beyond core integration. Service desk analysts can access office applications, including Microsoft Exchange Calendars, task integration, and two-way email interfaces using Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, and Novell GroupWise—improving communication and scheduling.

What’s more, being able to integrate with event management tools such as SolarWinds Orion and Nagios ensures that alerts from these systems deliver critical information to the service desk automatically for diagnosis, automated response, and resolution.

Process Automation at All Levels The need for process automation within IT seems obvious, yet it’s an area that has been underserved. LANDesk estimates that as much as 30% of IT operational costs can be attributed to redundant and repetitive tasks and the failure to document and adhere to IT best practices.

In addition, mobility is exploding. The number of devices, software implementations and security vulnerabilities, and IT regulatory compliance and management requirements will increase exponentially. IT departments will be hard pressed to manage their environment without some form of process automation.

Process with Automation Steps

Through an open architecture approach, the LANDesk Management Automation Platform enables process automation initiatives to be implemented for a broad spectrum of business and operational processes across multiple data, departmental, and application silos. The LANDesk process automation layer incorporates workflow connectors that allow processes to be constructed between LANDesk Service Desk and any of the industry’s top systems management and security applications, Web services, or other applications—as well as across the LANDesk product portfolio—allowing activities and actions from within LANDesk Service Desk to be passed back and forth. Simple or complex sequences of decisions and data can either be initiated from a process within LANDesk Service Desk or can initiate a service desk process or a service desk update, and can communicate with LANDesk Service Desk amongst other activities.

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Benefits of Automation Incorporating automation into the service management environment provides a supervisory layer for other management tools. By adding a policy and process engine capable of automating workflows and business processes, automation allows the service desk to connect manual steps with existing applications and data sources in a single continuous automated workflow that crosses management systems and business units. In doing so, the service desk realizes efficiency and productivity gains and enables the redistribution of resources to ultimately deliver increased value to the business and improve customer satisfaction.

Benefits of automation include:

■■ Reduced costs and risk■● Repeatable processes

■■ Follow tried and tested best practices every time; no time is wasted undoing poor practices; repeatable, predictable, consistent, error free

■■ Work the same way every time, even when things go wrong, e.g., a deployment fails because a device is not available

■● Staff can offload tasks and refocus from the mundane and repetitive to genuine value-added activities, increasing staff satisfaction

■■ Reduced time to execute■● More rapid response and increased user satisfaction

■■ Increased audit and accountability■● Integrate ongoing compliance measures within your IT

processes, eliminating the stress of audits and supplying needed information when audits occur

Problems Automation Can Solve Process workflows can be built so the next step in the process is assigned automatically to an individual or team, the right authorizations are being requested, and notifications are sent when the request is fulfilled. This provides a full-circle request fulfillment service that moves the service desk beyond just managing requests to physically delivering the service with little or no IT involvement. For example, any request for software that costs money can be routed automatically to the requester’s manager for authorization before deployment, and notification of the completed action can be sent.

Common tasks solved with automation using LANDesk Service Desk include:

■■ Mobile device wipes■● Self service requests can initiate an automated workflow

to erase a mobile profile from a lost or stolen phone■■ Physical management of virtual environments

■● Automation of the creation and removal of virtual environments at the request of employees or students; e.g., if they require temporary access to a software application for a specified amount of time

■■ USB flash drive security■● Self service exception requests are routed automatically to

allow authorized data transfers to USB flash drives■■ Release management

■● Automatic storage of master copy software at build and test, followed by the deployment of a release package from a service management release and change process

■■ Systems and security management■● Correct and consistent handling of systems and security

events■■ Identity, access, and password management

■● Automatic user creation, user removal, password changes, or systems and data access requests via authentication through system and Active Directory management

■■ Change management■● Automatic detection of unauthorized changes and

notification of the service desk