IT specialist Landesk announced the release of Service Desk 2016, which rolls up enhancements made in the past year and delivers additional capabilities designed to help businesses be more productive, improve user experiences and support organizations in their drive to modernize IT.
A new Skype adapter captures exchanges between business users and IT within Service Desk, and the connection to Skype improves tracking, knowledge sharing and the end-user experience.
In addition, the Design App Store allows service desk administrators to create, view and select new modules and customizable capabilities, such as project portfolio management, social media and gamification apps.
“The experience of our own customer base demonstrates that a modern digital enterprise will have individuals working in many locations around the world speaking different languages,” Steven Morton, an executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Landesk, told eWEEK. “Increasingly, IT organizations must embrace and provide in-language IT support experiences for their end users.”
Morton explained that service management design is unique to each business and a good service management solution allows an organization to both define the correct activity and communicate contextually in the language of the user.
“It’s never a static system—continual improvement is always required so that a multilingual approach benefits not only the end user but also the administrator of the service management system,” he said. “Write once, use many [times]. Advances in transport, communication and technology mean that enterprises are increasingly reaching across borders to enter new markets or find the best and most cost-effective labor resources.”
Morton explained that it’s hard to implement modernization programs in a business environment that needs to overcome internal friction.
“Fortunately, good tools make it easier to implement modernization programs offering the speed and stability that is required through any process of change,” he said, noting that poor communication is often cited by organizations as their biggest challenge.
Service Desk 2016 also enhances IT analyst and end-user workspaces to highlight recommended services and deliver meaningful service descriptions, images, videos, dynamic windows and more.
“ITSM [IT service management] organizations are well placed to improve communication by offering channels of interaction, [such as] self-service portals that can house notice boards [and] automate communications as they work through processes to keep end users and stakeholders abreast of changes,” Morton noted. “They can also use business-value dashboards that show the positive impact of modernization projects on enterprises, departments or groups of workers.”