Today, organizations in all industries and of all sizes rely on information technology to provide high quality services to internal employees and external customers alike.  As technology changes and becomes more and more complex, the ability to provide world-class service and support to those who use it is more relevant than ever before.

Your organization may have different needs than others, perhaps even different from your competitors, but they are needs that should be addressed with the right procedures and technologies.

SMA offers IT consulting services to help companies find and address their IT gaps. Read about SMA's 5-Step IT Service Management Assessment and our approach to enhancing support.

The key requirement for the service management function is the creation and management of the IT Service Desk.  The service desk is the point of contact (usually the single point of contact) for providing your customers with a variety of information and support, including:

• General information, such as hours of operation, procedures and processes, technology guidelines, etc.;
• Tier 1 support for questions that can be answered in a short period of time;
• Escalation of issues to Tier 2 or others who have specific expertise that is not available at Tier 1;
• Tracking of problems and solutions;
• Use of existing and creation of new knowledge to solve issues;
• Use of IT asset information, if available, to solve issues;
• Initiation of problem definition for use by other support personnel;
• Creation of requests for Change (especially in ITIL-based processes);
• And other functions that support customer requests.

Many organizations use an out-of-the-box customer service and support tool such as HEAT software to efficiently track and resolve customer issues. HEAT software's reporting and management features also help companies gain control of their service and support issues. HEAT software was designed with ITIL principles in mind.

In the past few years, IT service management has conformed more and more to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL.  ITIL processes are defined in a set of books that define various aspects of the major functions performed by the service desk, including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management, Service Level Management and Self Service.

Our clients seeking to meet all of the ITIL principles have selected ITSM software.  With ITSM, a product from FrontRange Solutions, the developers of the HEAT help desk solution, you can meet ITIL standards with a phased approach based on your business and customer requirements.