Hornbill Service Manager Accelerates Evolution of Collaborative Service Desk

ITSM Application and Hornbill Platform Place Collaboration at the Centre of ITSM

Hornbill today launched Service Manager, its flagship collaborative service management application, together with the Hornbill collaboration platform. Service Manager represents a fresh approach, designed to allow organisations of any size to modernise and invigorate their IT service management operation by introducing collaboration tools built around the way people actually work. Hornbill Service Manager has been designed for collaboration; using principles made familiar by consumer social media tools to ensure workers can easily and naturally share information and follow best practices. Built for ease of implementation, customisation and use, and with a flexible cost model that allows organisations to pick exactly what they need when they need it, collaboration within the service desk is simpler than it’s ever been.

“There has been little innovation within the ITSM market, both in terms of tools and processes,” said Gerry Sweeney, founder and CEO of Hornbill. “IT has a unique and influential role in business but is often accused of treading water and being the blocker for progress; ultimately left firefighting minor issues instead of adding business value. We believe that whilst best practice and process is important, nothing can be made to work properly until you have your people engaged and working effectively. If organisations can enable teams to work in a familiar and easy way, and have them implicitly follow well thought out and well-designed business processes without needing to actually be aware of those processes, guaranteeing best practice and processes becomes far simpler. By designing Service Manager to be a familiar, enjoyable and easy to use experience, that’s precisely what we at Hornbill have created.”

Service Manager is available today in Hornbill’s App Store. Key features include:

Automated Management: Service Manager is designed to make dealing with ITIL-aligned incidents, problems, change, service requests and assets as streamlined as possible. An intuitive call logging process allows service desks to identify and track customers throughout the lifecycle procedure, whilst Progressive Capture functionality improves the ease of data capture, making life much easier for analysts. A powerful but easy to configure graphical workflow engine drives processes forward, visualised for analysts in a clear “where am I?” innovative heads up display.

Information at a glance: Service Manager provides service all the information needed to help customers and deliver first-class customer service. The Service Desk Dashboard allows incidents and requests to be viewed at a glance; all incidents and requests assigned to an analyst or analyst group can be viewed with My Requests; and updates to active calls are aggregated on the Analyst’s News Feed.

Self-Service: Service Manager’s self-service capabilities allow users to both get updates and find solutions either directly or through interaction with peers. Users can see and add their own assets; identify and join workspaces to discuss issues; and help direct their peers towards useful solutions.

Language and Culture:  Service Manager is multi-language, supporting not only a multiple language user interface but also real-time content translations, allowing users to exchange ideas and information whether in multiple languages or their native tongue.

Mobile: Hornbill’s native mobile app enables Service Manager users to access the application from any device, at any time and from anywhere.

Easy-to-use customisation: Service Manager can be customised to suit an organisation’s exact business processes, using a simple graphical interface to make changes to process, form design and progressive input capture. Every customisation or change made is guaranteed to be retained after platform or application upgrades.

Always-up-to-date: Upgrades are delivered continuously, thanks to the agile development methodology we employ called Continuous Delivery designed to ensure a continuous flow of feature enhancements are delivered to our customers. As a result Hornbill is always up-to-date and always being enhanced and improved.

Service Manager builds on Hornbill’s proven ITSM expertise, allowing organisations to support ITIL processes to ensure they are providing the best service possible to end-users. The ways of working and collaboration tools Service Manager and Hornbill introduce, such as timelines, workspaces and news feeds, will be familiar to service customers from personal devices and applications: making them as easy to use as possible and allowing users to concentrate on their key tasks.

Data from Forrester Research, revealed in its Benchmarking Technology’s Effect on Employee Engagement report (July 2013), shows a majority of the engaged workforce uses at least one social tool (53%) and/or one communication and collaboration tool (83%). TJ Keitt, the report’s author, wrote: “We’re beginning to see the benefits workers receive from these tools: 85% of social software users say they know how their work contributes to the company’s mission. Furthermore, these tools help build community, as the bulk of those using communication and collaboration tools say their colleagues do the same.”

Duncan Brown, Head of IT at UK and European Patent and Trade Mark Attorney firm JA Kemp, stated: “The IT service desk is vital to our business operations. The simplicity and flexibility of Service Manager, coupling familiar social media tools and concepts with the ability to adapt to our own business processes, has helped the service team be more productive and also more proactive in the way that it communicates with the business. Ultimately this helps us in our drive to move away from reacting to incidents and firefighting to focusing on service improvement and driving our business forward.”

Hornbill Service Manager is available immediately. For more information, visit http://hornbill.com/

About Hornbill

Hornbill is a technology innovator in business applications and collaboration technology. It develops and markets the Hornbill Platform and Business Applications that help organisations of any size provide applications and productivity tools to their workers. Hornbill’s unique ‘human Touch’ approach to IT services has benefitted customers at thousands of commercial and government sites worldwide.

Hornbill was founded in 1995, and has a head office in London. It also supports the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) as a corporate member in its campaign to save the hornbill species in its native habitat.

For more information please visit www.hornbill.com