ITIL for the Beginner: 4 Common Misconceptions

There is a saying about a certain road, to a rather inhospitable destination, and how it is paved with the best intentions. For the most part I have heard, and applied, this maxim throughout my personal and professional life. Having many times, traveled my own roads, laid with my own good ideas of a grand outcome, only to find myself in a complete mess, blaming myself and scoffing at the thought of even having had an idea. My own IT projects, both successful and unsuccessful, have followed this path.

Of course, all those failures align to experience, and the risks taken, while sometimes costly - pay dividends down the road in the form of even better successes. In a way, it’s like our own fear of getting lost, making that wrong turn, and then not know where we are going. However, what we fail to realize, is that taking wrong turns, especially to those destinations we expect to return to over and over again, means we will very unlikely repeat such a mistake in the future. Moreover, as long as we remember the past, and take good notes for when we can’t quite remember, our triumph will be built on tribulation.

8 Areas to Improve Help Desk Customer Experiences

If you can, imagine for a moment that your help or service desk functions much more like an independent nation. To give you a few facts about this nation, which we will call Helpdesktopia, we will assume that your currency is time, and your chief natural resource is service. Your country has made a name for itself by taking incidents and requests (the main export of Customeria), and refining them into your own chief export, resolutions. Given all this, your gross domestic product, or the main indicator to the health of your economy is Positive Customer Experience (PCE).

Throwback Thursday: Twitter Password Security Edition

If you are a security conscious individual, this week's Twitter password leak likely gave you a big scare. Even though the exposure looks to be small, just 55 thousand of the near 500 million total accounts, it is still a very scary prospect. It's not new though, and security experts far and wide preach about the dangers of password security every day.


This week's Throwback Thursday is focused on our past posts related to all security topics, not just those regarding passwords. After the break, take a look at what our team had to say. Plus,  we have five tips from Microsoft Business Blogger Kim Komando*:

Help Desk 101 – 4 Essential Automations for Email Support

After writing about things to consider if your company is using email-only support, we decided that there is more to it than good old fashioned customer service. Support provided by email is a tactical approach allowing small teams to handle a much larger volume of tickets. If done correctly, your team will easily surpass the typical intake of the average phone-only help desk. 

Given the above, email support can be very effective and much easier process for the customer. Customers can bypass the use of long forms full of mandatory fields and stay confined in the safety of their inbox. Using a competent incident management tool your team will be able to offer a simplified support option for your customers, adding to your already robust forms of communication.

Throwback Thursday: Improving Your Help Desk

Help and service desk improvement is on almost every IT organization’s agenda these days. In fact, we write at least once a week about ways to improve the customer experience. Much of that involves making sure your desk works like a well-oiled machine, paying close attention to automation, efficiency, and service. If you can improve these and make adjustments, in parallel, to your ITSM solution, you will start to notice big improvements.

We realized that some of our most popular posts are related to the help / service desk, and decided for this week’s Throwback Thursday, we collect some of our best stories. There is some great content here, and we suggest you read them all.

See you next Thursday!

The SunView Software Team

ITIL Projects: What to Do, and What Not to Do

Navigating life successfully is about learning from your own mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others. IT, for better or worse, follows the same logic. Often though, we get wrapped up more in trying to figure out how to fix the problems ourselves, or simply try to follow a boilerplate set of instructions. IT, or even life for that matter, doesn’t quite work that way.