Find the IT Solution That’s Right for Your A Buyer’s Guide for Executives Executive Summary Today, IT is relied upon to support a broad spectrum of users and business services in an enterprise. As these look to fulfill their charter, IT service management (ITSM) solution can either be an invaluable ally or a persistent liability. This guide examines the unprecedented demands IT organizations must contend with and details the specific capabilities organizations should demand to address their needs, giving IT decision makers the insight they need to decide on the right ITSM solution.

2 Introduction For enterprise IT organizations, and the service providers they work with, the technical and business landscape has shifted substantially, becoming more complex at an accelerated pace. The following are a few of the fundamental shifts changing IT today:

Changing user expectations Changing business demands Bring your own device (BYOD) trends and the consumerization of IT have More than ever, physical and virtual IT infrastructures underpin the most irrevocably changed the IT landscape. Today’s IT consumers users are also critical business services delivered to users and consumers. Ultimately, participants in the broader digital world, relying upon sophisticated online business agility and performance are integrally bound to IT agility and services for financial transactions, social engagement, news and technical performance. IT teams have moved beyond being responsible for managing support. Users have grown accustomed to digital services accessed from the IT “plumbing,” to enabling innovation and supporting corporate any location, on any device, and at any time, including via mobile browsers strategies. These changing realities have raised the bar for IT, creating new or apps. Those expectations don’t just disappear once it’s time to get to work. demands for IT efficiency, productivity and responsiveness. IT teams thus need to deliver the same levels of convenience, collaboration An IT ’s success in adapting to these changes is integrally and flexibility—or leave users frustrated and disappointed. They must deliver intertwined with their IT service management (ITSM) capabilities. With an consumer friendly services that are well defined, easy to understand effective ITSM framework, organizations can realize these core objectives: and automated. • Increase efficiency of service operations Changing delivery models • Improve service support and user experience The days of an enterprise IT environment that is solely internally sourced • Enhance business transparency are long gone. Today, rely on IT services furnished through an • Mitigate software audit risk increasingly broad set of delivery models and providers. In effect, IT • Leverage delivery models that improve service levels and reduce cost organizations have moved from being service providers to service brokers, To achieve these objectives, organizations need the right ITSM solution, managing an increasingly complex ecosystem of hosting and colocation one that is optimally aligned with the objectives of both the business and IT services, outsourcing firms, cloud providers, managed service providers and operations. This buyer’s guide offers an in-depth look at the ITSM solution so on. These changes necessitate a new level of transparency in the dynamics capabilities enterprise IT teams need today, providing the insights executives of financing IT. Cloud offerings such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and need to find the right ITSM solution for their businesses. This guide looks in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in particular have changed the lens through detail at today’s challenges, as well as the associated goals and solution which the value and success of IT services are measured. requirements needed to contend with these challenges.

3 Criteria: #1 Increase Operational Efficiency

Today’s IT organizations are incurring service costs that are perceived as too high, while at the same time not appearing to deliver adequate returns on their investments. Expensive resources are spending too much time trying to resolve complex technical issues. Business consumers are frustrated because they have no control: they can’t expedite help desk response, and they can’t resolve issues themselves. Requesting services is difficult and not remotely intuitive.

IT analysts are frustrated as well. They can’t respond to users as quickly and effectively as they would like, and issue resolution is complex, labor intensive, error prone and time consuming. Ill-defined processes for completing work result in delays for the delivery of new services that are urgently needed by the business. Ultimately, these conditions hurt the organization substantially, resulting in the disruption of critical business services, lost user productivity, inferior customer service and diminished business performance.

4 Criteria #1: Increase Operational Efficiency

Capabilities Required Leverage automation IT support teams need to leverage automation, particularly in such To mitigate the challenges outlined, IT organizations need ITSM solutions areas as ticket creation, service delivery and fulfillment and resolution of that enable them to realize several key objectives: infrastructure events. Doing so, they will become more efficient and thus be Improve Staff Efficiency better able to allocate their time and efforts to initiatives in alignment with business objectives. Further, issue prioritization should be automated based Boosting staff productivity and efficiency is a vital mandate. The following on well-defined criteria for addressing not only business impact but business are several keys to making this happen: consumer perceptions. Deliver self-service capabilities Harness integration of service and infrastructure management To improve IT staff efficiency, it is vital to equip business consumers Organizations need to break down the silos that have often existed between with the capabilities they need to not only get answers and request services service management and infrastructure management and do more than just or help, but to solve problems themselves. This can offload significant time open tickets every time an operational alert is received. Given that technology and effort from support analysts, while providing greater user satisfaction. is so integral to everything the business delivers, IT organizations need to Improve collaboration aggregate outage data and integrate this information with existing systems The more information support analysts can share, and the more efficiently in order to rapidly determine the root cause of business service disruptions. they can do so, the more productive the entire team will be. Organizations Improve Service Levels need to foster collaboration among team members, through access to historical tickets, knowledge-base content and automation of such routine, For IT to be seen as an enabler of technology and business innovation rather time-consuming tasks as approvals, request routing and escalation. than a necessary but inefficient support department, it’s essential for IT teams to improve the actual and perceived service levels provided to both Best practices users and the business. To achieve these objectives, IT organizations need to: To optimize team efficiency and ensure service obligations are met, IT organizations need to leverage best practices like ITIL® as they integrate and Minimize and prevent service disruption automate request, incident, problem and processes. In the event of outages and performance issues, IT analysts need fast and These best practices should also form the basis of defining the routes accurate root cause analysis (RCA) capabilities. Further, by leveraging that work should take and establish indicators of progress and automated, proactive prevention measures and enabling IT analysts to automated escalations. understand and mitigate the effects of infrastructure events, organizations will be better equipped to predict and address issues, before they have a wider business impact.

5 Criteria #1: Increase Operational Efficiency

Gain a unified view of business services and IT infrastructure Outcomes To effectively prioritize investments and efforts, it’s critical that IT organizations can quickly and definitively map IT infrastructure to associated By leveraging the capabilities above, organizations can realize the business services. Further, staff needs to be able to understand how issues and following results: requests map to business priorities. Improve service responsiveness Establish service level visibility Through increased operational efficiency, service teams can respond to users Service managers need to have visibility into the levels of performance and and resolve issues more quickly. Consequently, organizations can reduce availability users are experiencing, and to analyze these metrics in relation to customer complaints and improve user satisfaction and productivity. relevant service level agreements (SLAs) and business impact. Further, this Cut costs visibility needs to apply to all important business and IT services, no matter Organizations can realize substantial cost reductions by leveraging proactive where they are hosted. issue prevention, automation and standardization. Further, by reducing the Improve Change Management cost of ongoing “keeping the lights on” activities, organizations can free up Unless team members have the change management capabilities they need, resources for higher value, more strategic efforts. they run the persistent risk of implementing alterations in the infrastructure Reduce risk that have unintended consequences and ultimately impact the business. By leveraging capabilities for more proactive service management, Managers and team members need to guard against so-called rogue organizations can significantly reduce the risk of performance issues and configuration changes and ensure that only acceptable changes are made. downtime—and the business risk associated with these events. This requires that administrators have the visibility and controls needed to guard against conflicting changes to configuration items that support a given service, and that can ultimately create issues and outages. Further, teams need effective approval routing capabilities that inhibit erroneous changes, while streamlining the effort needed to execute the modifications required. Finally, this should also include the ability to help staff predict the potential impact of a given alteration, so they can explore different options and avoid making changes that result in downtime.

6 Criteria #2: Improve Service Support and User Experience

Challenges As previously mentioned, today’s enterprise IT users are also consumers, and have very different expectations than they did a few years ago. Users are accustomed to, and demand immediate, convenient, 24x7 access to services, and they want to interact via the method they prefer, even if that means using a phone or personal tablet to check status or make an inquiry. However, too often, current processes and technologies fail to meet these expectations. Instead, users encounter rigid processes, limited options, lengthy phone queues and more.

Further, time consuming incident and request management workflows mean experienced, and expensive, staff members spend a lot of time on repetitive, rudimentary tasks. In addition, many IT organizations see very high turnover rates with their first-level support staff, making it harder than ever to get support up to speed and productive, creating further delays in servicing business consumers.

Capabilities Required Outcomes To contend with the challenges outlined above, IT teams need to be When equipped with the capabilities outlined above, organizations can able to leverage capabilities that enable business consumers to help realize a number of benefits: themselves, so they can address issues without opening a ticket. • By improving the user experience, IT can begin to enjoy the This includes providing them with self-service capabilities, access via accolades of increased customer satisfaction. mobile phones and tablets, robust knowledge bases and the ability to collaborate and communicate with other business users. Further, these • When business consumers have the self-service capabilities they capabilities need to be delivered through an online portal that provides a need to help themselves, they can address issues and get up and convenient, powerful interface, one that offers a consistent presentation running more quickly, becoming more productive. and seamless access to all business and IT services. The interface should • IT support staff spend less time on repetitive tasks and low-level be modern, easy to use and simple to navigate. inquiries, so they can spend more time on higher-value, more strategic activities. IT can thus become more responsive and flexible to evolving business needs.

7 Criteria: #3 Improve Business Transparency

Challenges Capabilities Required While it may have been stated often, the fact remains: business and IT To gain the business transparency needed to address these challenges, alignment are vital. However, without the right ITSM tool, gaining the IT organizations need the following capabilities: transparency required to align IT with the business is difficult, if not • Timely insights into performance against agreed-upon SLAs, so service impossible. managers can follow trends and determine how best to address potential Here are a few of the ways this lack of capabilities can manifest itself: issues before they result in SLA breaches

IT spends too much time in fire-fighting mode, so routinely misses • Data collection and reporting that enable the measurement of service consumption in financial terms, enabling fact-based discussions about critical responsibilities and obligations associated with managing the budgets and investments performance of key business services. Consequently, IT gets penalized for breaching SLAs with the business, which can reduce the amount of • Dashboards and reports that demonstrate the quality of services being departmental chargebacks received and hurt the overall perception of provided and received service quality. • Insights that enable executives to proactively manage customer • IT organizations have a difficult time demonstrating the value agreements and vendor contracts of services they provide, which can increase the likelihood of • Contextual reporting and alerting that helps support staff focus, budget cuts. resources and efforts on those initiatives that will ultimately have the • IT management has a difficult time effectively governing vendors; biggest impact on the customer relationship it is hard to evaluate their performance and ultimately hold them accountable for the service levels they are supposed to provide.

• IT managers have little or no visibility into the cost or value of services being consumed by different business groups and users.

8 Criteria #3: Improve Business Transparency

Outcomes Avoid vendor disputes and ensure vendors deliver what is expected By leveraging objective information on vendor performance, service Once IT organizations gain the ITSM capabilities outlined above, they’re managers can much more effectively govern vendor relationships, make much better equipped to optimize their efforts for business requirements. more intelligent decisions in terms of vendor retention and ultimately get As a result, organizations can: better results from these resources.

Reduce downstream service outages Improve perceptions and customer satisfaction By harnessing timely insights into service levels, service managers can By elevating the service experience, support organizations can enjoy more effectively spot troubling issues and address them before they have significant improvements in customer satisfaction. Ultimately, across the an impact on users. business, the perception of IT will change. The organization will go from More consistently meet internal commitments and reduce penalties being seen as a reactive group to a proactive partner. By boosting operational efficiency and gaining proactive insights, service delivery teams are much better equipped to spot troubling trends, and address them, before an issue leads to an SLA breach.

Better manage demands and optimize strategic investments Armed with the business context surrounding IT initiatives, investments and tasks, service team leaders can better prioritize among conflicting or competing demands and ultimately focus more resources on the most strategic endeavors.

9 Criteria #4: Mitigate Software Audit Risk

Challenges When it comes to software audits, it can be a tremendous benefit to have a comprehensive inventory of software titles in use and to have this information correlated with the vendor contracts governing license availability. Unfortunately, most organizations have multiple sources of data, overlapping contracts and no effective way to evaluate consumption and compliance. This lack of oversight can pose a range of risks:

Over purchasing Lack of control Administrative staff loses track of which software licenses are being used While a lack of visibility historically presented challenges, those challenges and which aren’t, and ultimately the business spends way more than is are exacerbated in today’s IT environments. Virtualization, BYOD and cloud needed on software. computing can further reduce visibility into asset usage and allocations, which leads to further loss of control and increased business risk. Audit penalties and “true-ups” Lacking the necessary visibility, software audits represent time consuming and costly efforts, pulling people and investments from more strategic endeavors. If an audit uncovers overuse of software licenses, an organization may be subject to costly penalties and have to make additional license purchases—expenses that aren’t planned for in the IT budget, which means cuts have to be made somewhere else.

10 Criteria #4: Mitigate Software Audit Risk

Capabilities Required Outcomes To eliminate the penalties outlined, decision makers should look for ITSM Through improved visibility and control over software licenses, solutions that address the following demands: IT organizations can realize the following benefits:

• Service managers need to effectively track, aggregate and pool • Control license costs and reduce overspending. software licenses, so unused licenses can be optimally redistributed. • Minimize operational efforts associated with audit research. • When making decisions concerning the of new software, • Reduce the business and of noncompliance. decision makers need to be able to leverage relevant and current information around existing software usage. • Managers need timely, intuitive visibility into their organization’s compliance position and relationships among various license entitlements. • Executives need automated compliance management and reporting, data collection and reconciliation capabilities. • On an ongoing basis, leadership needs analytical capabilities that make it fast and efficient to discover potential compliance risks. • Managers need to be able to model and track rights owned and monitor various contract events, such as automatic renewal dates. • Leaders need the visibility required to track, report on and reconcile software usage in virtualized, cloud and BYOD environments.

11 Criteria: #5 Reduce Total Cost of Ownership for Service Operations

Challenges ITSM tools can play a significant role in the ultimate efficiency and cost associated with the entire service operation. The following are just a few of the examples of how legacy ITSM products may hurt organizations:

Impeding change Frustrating users Many legacy platforms require laborious coding and customization in order to Laboring to support a tool with antiquated interfaces and technologies, address new capabilities or technologies. As a result, they can significantly service delivery teams simply can’t hope to match the levels of intuitiveness, inhibit an organization’s ability to leverage innovations and deliver new ease and flexibility they and their users have grown accustomed to as services and enhancements. Further, this custom code creates a host consumers—and therefore can’t meet user expectations. Users grow of issues when organizations look to upgrade to a new version of the increasingly frustrated by being forced to interact with IT through disparate, ITSM platform. inconvenient channels.

Exacting high costs Over time, organizations make significant investments in tool customization and integration, but those expenses are just the beginning. These sunk costs leave executives loathe to move to a new product, while saddling organizations with old technologies that create high infrastructure and staffing expenses.

12 Criteria #5: Reduce Total Cost of Ownership for Service Operations

Capabilities Required Outcomes To address these challenges, IT organizations need to migrate to an ITSM With the capabilities outlined above, IT organizations can realize a number platform that helps them: of significant benefits:

Eliminate custom code Reduce operational costs Today, organizations must be able to integrate ITSM platforms and adapt By leveraging a platform that eliminates custom coding efforts, them to their specific requirements, without having to incur the cost, effort organizations can reduce costs associated with migration and upgrades— and complexity of custom coding. and substantially reduce the time, effort and distraction of supporting the service desk infrastructure. Deliver intuitive self-service For today’s users, it’s vital that IT organizations provide self-service Lower training costs capabilities that emulate the intuitive interfaces and convenience of By eliminating the need to document and support custom code, common consumer applications. IT organizations can reduce staff training costs. Further, by delivering intuitive self-service capabilities through a unified interface, businesses Deliver a unified interface for all services can substantially reduce employee training costs and efforts. As opposed to making users work with different systems and interfaces for different tasks, organizations need to deliver a unified interface through Optimize utilization which all requests and services can be accessed. A common, consistent and intuitive interface provides an easier and more cost effective way for users to work with IT—and enables them to work the way they prefer. This can help foster improved adoption among users, which helps ensure organizations maximize the return on their solution investments.

13 Conclusion Now more than ever, business performance is reliant upon IT performance—and that’s why an organization’s ITSM capabilities are increasingly important. With the right ITSM solution, IT organizations can enable improved service levels and user productivity, streamlined operations, maximized resource utilization and optimized support for the realization of critical business objectives.

14 Appendix: Purchasing Criteria Worksheet

As they look for new ITSM solutions, decision makers can use the following worksheet to track the performance of vendors against the most critical evaluation criteria.

EVALUATING CRITERIA WEIGHTING VENDOR 1 VENDOR 2 VENDOR 3

Self-service

User experience

Workflow and automation

Built-in content and best practices

Incident and

Service catalog and request management

Service cost and

Service level management

Change management

Asset lifecycle management

Software

Ad-hoc and pre-packaged, advanced analytics and dashboards

Support automation

Integration capabilities

Collaboration and knowledge sharing

Mobile accessibility and performance

Deployment model (true SaaS, vendor hosted instance, or on premise)

Multi-tenancy support

Administrative overhead (including skill sets required)

24x7 availability

15 About CA ITSM Solutions

CA Technologies offers ITSM solutions that can help boost service quality and With these comprehensive management capabilities, IT teams can improve resource utilization across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Delivered the quality of their services, prevent interruptions and lower costs—all of via SaaS, on-premises or hosted and managed service models, these solutions which helps to ensure that services stay aligned with business requirements. enable IT teams to implement repeatable, measurable processes for defining, transitioning, delivering and supporting services and assets throughout their lifecycles. With these solutions, organizations can:

• Run service operations more efficiently and improve business productivity and customer satisfaction • Improve the end-user experience with a highly scalable, reliable system that is aligned with the expectations of today’s users • Reduce cost and optimize service delivery through automation, workflow For more information, and operational integration • Reduce risk with improved visibility and robust capabilities for managing please visit ca.com/ITSM change, configuration, software compliance and SLAs

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate – across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com.

Copyright © 2015 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. ITIL is a registered trademark of AXELOS Ltd. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document “as is” without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill, or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages.

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