Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how automation, self service, and analytics are combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less.

1. IT Support Gains Automation and Intelligence to Bring Self-
Service to Both Legacy and Mobile Users
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how automation, self service, and analytics are
combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HPE Discover Podcast Series.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and
moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making
an impact on people’s lives.
Our next IT support thought leadership discussion highlights how automation,
self-service and big data analytics are combining to allow IT helpdesks to do
more for less.
We will see how automation and ITSM-driven insights endow helpdesk
personnel with more knowledge and provide a single point of support for end users, regardless of
their needs and still catering to their preferred method of help.
Here to share the latest on how IT support is advancing in the era of bring your own device
(BYOD), cloud, and tight budgets, we're joined by three experts. Please allow me to introduce
you to David Blackeby, Program Solution Owner for Cloud Services at Sopra Steria, and he is
based in the UK. Welcome, David.
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David Blackeby: Good morning.
Gardner: We're also here with Diana Wosik. She is Group Program Manager at Sopra
Steria and she's based in Poland. Welcome, Diana.
Diana Wosik: Good morning.
Gardner: And we're here with Mark Laird. He is Group Technical Architect at
Sopra Steria and he is also based in the UK. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Laird: Good morning.
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Gardner

2. Gardner: Thanks for joining us everyone. Let’s start at a high level and talk about how support
has changed and why enabling self-service is so important nowadays. Mark, why is this self-
service such an important issue when it comes to IT helpdesk?
Laird: For us, there are probably a number of issues. We have a range across our customer base,
from millennials, who are used to dealing with websites, mobile, tablets, who really don’t want
to call a call center, and don’t want to end up talking to somebody on the phone,
through to the legacy users who are much more used to picking up the phone,
asking for help, and talking through a problem.
So they're looking for a more human approach, human interaction, versus the
millennials who want to fix it themselves, want to do it quickly, and really don’t
want to talk to somebody about it. That’s introducing a range of problems and
challenges.
Gardner: It sounds as if you need to deliver support in a spectrum of ways, more medium, if
you will, but perhaps with a common core to that support function.
Underlying answer
Laird: The underlying answer to the problem, whatever the problem is, is likely to be the
same. If you have a log-on issue, it will be a password reset or an account issue. It’s how you get
that information out to the person who has the challenge.
If it’s a person on the phone, it's easy enough to talk them through it. But if you have somebody
who is coming through a self-service portal, you have to provide them with that same
information. So yes, at times, you connect a single call, a single database, and send your
knowledge environment to a range of callers.
Gardner: David, we're being called on here to deliver support across the spectrum of modalities,
methods, or even latency, but at the same time, many of the world governments are asking for
austerity and savings in their budgets for IT. How are we able to reconcile this need for more
variety and the delivery of helpdesk services, but cutting costs at the same time? Is there any way
to reconcile them?
Blackeby: It’s part of the core challenge in the current world with austerity,
where both our public and private customers are looking at how they can do more
for less money.
IT has continuing cost pressures to reduce cost and overhead of providing IT. At
the same time, we talk about new methods of self-service, different types of
platforms and different types of devices and this multi-channel effect that costs
time, effort and money to invest in these technologies.
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Laird
Blackeby

3. That’s the underlying driver for how it comes down to the service provider to do that. The only
way we can do that is looking at industrializing that service delivery and automating processes,
moving activities that may have previously been done by Level 2 and Level 3 resources. We're
looking at how we can move those to cheaper or lower-cost resources, such as a service desk, or
in an ideal world, remove them entirely from the cost chain and drive the automation. So the
activity increases the speed and the agility while reducing the cost of delivering the service.
Gardner: Diana, another variable in the mix here is the increased use of mobile devices, of
fluidity of the user in terms of their geography, their location, even the time of day that they
might be working, and of course there is a plethora of devices, if you want to bring your own
device organization. How is mobility affecting this equation for a more complex approach to
helpdesk?
Wosik: Mobility is very important nowadays, because everybody uses mobile devices, every
single day. We need to ensure a single point of contact, so they all can approach their helpdesk at
any time they need, and they need the availability 24×7 for that.
Gardner: So, we've established that we have a need for more variability,
addressing more types of help from more types of users. Tell me a bit more,
Mark, about automation and self-service and how they support one another?
What is it about automating processes that endows the user with more access
to help, but then maybe that same feedback loop between the user and the
support infrastructure can be brought to bear on future issues?
Laird: Automation is doing the same thing in a repeated, controlled fashion. Whether it’s a
password reset or the delivery of a service or a server, what you're doing is scripting. You're
putting into a workflow a process that a user can call on. Whether that user is an end user, an end
customer, or in fact one of the operations team, it allows them to do that fairly standard process
in a repeated quality controlled fashion.
And that can allow lower cost, potentially, as David said, bringing the tasks from maybe a
qualified Level 3 expensive support person into an operations center, or in fact, maybe on to the
self-service portal, where you're not having to give access to systems to end users, but you are
allowing them to run a script.
Double benefit
Gardner: David, perhaps you could help me understand why self-service is a benefit to both
the receiver of the help, the end user, as well as the organization. What is it about self-service
that refines process and benefits the deliverer of the help, but at the same time, gives more speed
or perhaps options to the receiver of the help?
Blackeby: Essentially it supports both sides of the equation. From an end user perspective, it’s
that instant gratification, I can go into a centralized portal. I can do my search or raise my request
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Wosik

4. and I can be instantly satisfied with the response. I could be presented with a knowledge article
that tells me how to fix my particular issue.
If I'm requesting a new service to be delivered through orchestration in the back end, I can make
my request, and the orchestration comes in and drives the automated delivery of that service to
me. So it increases the agility for the user and it reduces delays.
From the other side of the equation, looking at it from a service provider’s perspective, the more
work the user can do themselves takes cost away from us as a service provider.
Historically, a user would have called the service desk, so as a part of that conversation you need
to understand who the user is to provide them the service. Make sure it’s a service that they are
potentially allowed to have and sort of help through the process. That means that we need a body
to answer the phone, and the amount of time that we spend on a typical call from the user drives
the cost from a support center perspective.
Even if you have a scenario where a user using the portal today, and still need ultimately a
human interaction to deliver that service, we already know who they are, and will have asked
relevant questions upfront which means we don’t have to ask the questions later on down the line
when we try to deliver a service. That reduces the handling time by our agents and by the people
who are delivering them the service.
Gardner: Before we dig into the how you do this, now that we have established why it's an
important new aspect of helpdesk, Diana, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about Sopra Steria,
the organization, and to what degree you're supporting helpdesks in your markets?
Wosik: I can give you a good example of how it works in Poland and how the automation helps
us out regarding the functionality of helpdesk.
We apply quite a few solutions, like virtual machine (VM) provisioning that has been
automatically provisions the machines aligned to customer needs. There is a monitoring tool that
is automated. So not only we monitor whatever is going on, but we're also able to answer the
needs very quickly, thanks to our automation services.
And then there's the thing regarding the automatic deployment of our releases. Whenever there's
a new release of the system, we don’t need a bunch of people who are going to work on it. We
can also deploy it very quickly in production, and that helps us to bring the solution as quickly as
possible to our customer.
Higher-level view
Gardner: David or Mark, could you give us a higher-level view of Sopra Steria the
organization and to what degree helpdesk support is part of a larger portfolio of services?
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5. Laird: We're a European IT company. We run IT for a wide range of European customers. We
deliver services. We write software. We do business process outsourcing. Essentially, if there's a
computer involved in there somewhere, that’s what we do.
We have a presence in 27 countries across Europe, in India, and then smaller offices in
Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. We have 36,500 staff, and an annual turnover of about 3.5
billion euros. So, we're a reasonably large company, one of the top 10 European IT companies.
For us, the service desk is the single point of contact. For all of our customers, that is their point
of contact with us, whether it’s through the Global Delivery Center in Poland, where we're
offering French, German, English, small amounts of Spanish and Italian, or through some of the
in-country service desks, such as the ones we have in France and the UK. So that is our single
point of contact and it’s of key importance to us.
Blackeby: Just to follow on from that, the key piece of that is that it’s an intelligent service desk
as opposed to a helpdesk. It’s really about having the phones manned by intelligent people who
are able to both try and fix or resolve issues straight away, as opposed to just logging a call,
creating a ticket, and passing it off to someone else.
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Gardner: Let’s dig into that a little bit. How is it that we're providing those individuals on the
front line with better knowledge? Are they getting more tools? Are they getting more data? Is this
really just correlating a single point of access to the existing data? Is it all of the above? How do
we empower those people to do this difficult helpdesk job better?
Blackeby: In the same way that we try to have a single point of entry for users, for a portal, it’s
really the same piece for our support staff as well.
While there are many systems that underpin our service delivery, the key element we try to strive
for is that the operators have a single place to work. It’s very much thorough the integration of
various systems and data sources into a centralized repository, so that the person that’s trying to
act on a ticket, request, or other activity has everything they need in one place, so they can
immediately see what the issue is, see what the request is, and then deliver the service to that end
user.
Gardner: It strikes me that whether it’s a helpdesk’s person or the end user, the more they use
this, the more the data can be collected, the more knowledge can be harnessed from the
interactions, and therefore brought back through a feedback loop into the next level of support.
Is the cost savings on this ultimately about you're better able to understand the market because of
the self-service, because of these portal approaches? Is that a big part of it?
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6. Key items
Blackeby: It feeds into that. If you're looking at industrializing or automating, you're really
looking for repeatable activities that are done time and time again. The data helps to support that.
It identifies suitable candidates that are high volume, high throughput transactions that are really
the key things that you want to focus on in terms of introducing automation into the
environment, or automation into task elements in a given process. So, over time, it’s pretty much
what we are doing.
As Mark mentioned, we're a managed service provider (MSP), providing the services across
many customers. So, a lot of the economies of scale we get are best practices that we apply in
one account or particular scenarios or issues that we see in one, we can see correlations in other
customer accounts as well. So we can bring those efficiencies and bring that investment we make
and automation through our back office processes to benefit multiple customers.
Wosik: What is very well known right now is big data and smart analytics that will help us to
gather all the information from our customers, so the more tickets and the more incidents are
logged, the more information you can gather as well. This is gathered and analyzed. This is when
we can provide more accurate and quicker answers to our customers. It’s something that has
really impacted our quality of service.
Gardner: Let’s look also back to the systems, when we think about gathering information, more
and more big data gathered from logs and other output data from the systems themselves, from
the platforms. How are you at Sopra Steria managing the knowledge gathering from your
systems and then applying that into this other knowledge base about the activities on your
helpdesk and from the self-help portal?
Laird: We're looking at some of the new technologies around smart analytics and big data, but
we're starting with some of the simpler approaches, which as David alluded to and as Diana
mentioned earlier, are just the simple high-volume transactions, the things that we do on a
regular basis that are maybe quality issues or maybe they are just time consuming, but those are
the key ones we're after.
Then, over the next three to six months, as we move into some of the newer technologies around
smart analytics, for example, we'll be taking some of the incidents and things coming into service
desk, into the service management system, and looking at those and doing problem management
on them.
Have we suddenly got an influx of incidents around our exchange platform? Is that actually
indicating that there is an underlying problem or an underlying system error that we need to fix?
It’s starting to link all the various systems, whether it’s the business service monitoring system to
the back end that the operations teams are using, or the service management platforms at the
front that our service desk people are using, pulling all those together, tying them in with, for
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7. example, the configuration management platform, so that people are seeing the same
information, both from a front-end user impacting view, or from a back-end infrastructure and
service view.
Gardner: And I should think that would also help in more agility to do root-cause analysis and
making it faster to time for resolution.
Automate and fix
Laird: Exactly. That back goes back to when we fix problems, close incidents, and if there's a
resolution in there, doing the analysis on them to identify common fixes. If an incident comes in
or a particular type of incident comes in and we always do the same thing to it, we can automate
that. We can actually either get the service desk or helpdesk people access to that quick fix or just
automate it right at the start, so when that issue occurs, we automate and fix.
In some cases, that’s moving out of the customer’s view completely. We're fixing it almost before
there's an impact.
Gardner: We've talked a bit about making these helpdesk approaches better from the end-user
perspective, empowering the personnel in the helpdesk organization itself, and finding some new
technologies and analysis benefits to propel that forward, but I would like to go back to the issue
of cost.
How are we wringing out more cost from this process, perhaps things like identifying automation
and what’s called shift left, better or earlier in the process. So, where are we targeting to get the
most results when it comes to cost reduction in all of this?
Blackeby: It really talks about how people do transactions, what things are continually occurring
that have a high amount of touch points to them. Some of that comes out through time.
One of the challenges we have when we take on a new customer is that you don’t have the
excellent benefit of hindsight around how the organization works and what their common
problems are. So, as we take on a new customer or a new contract, we have the ability to go and
talk to their existing service provider or their in-house person. A lot of that comes out over time.
There are some standard things that we can recognize, because we have similar customers in
similar marketplaces or industries and things that we would expect to get from the outset, and by
looking at things like password reset tools and things like that are common and applicable across
all types of clients.
Then, it’s a case of looking at your volumetrics over time, your repeatable activities, incidents
and requests, identifying how can we drive the agility and improve the service levels that we're
delivering, and at the same time, reduce cost.
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8. Take a simple thing like software deployment to users machines, historically, that might have
been a call to the service desk. They might have dispatched a desk-side engineer or used remote
control to be able to connect with a user’s device to go and install the software.
These days, more and more commonly, we can use software distribution, or automated software
push tools, that don’t require human interaction at all. We can automatically deploy software to
the user.
Zero-touch environment
That moves into that zero-touch type of environment. Through a portal request, we can manage
the workflow around any approval activities. Then once fully approved, through the orchestration
at the back-end, we can interface by software deployment solution to automate the delivery of
that software to that endpoint device.
And we support many different types of devices now. We've seen more and more cases where not
only are we talking about physical desktops or laptops, but also around how we manage mobile
devices and tablet type devices as well, using mobility and mobile device management solutions.
Gardner: Let’s look at some of these solutions in practice. Sopra Steria has been doing this for,
as you say, some time and across a large marketplace. Do you have any examples that
demonstrate when you can do this well that you get those benefits of self-help, common core
data, more knowledgeable helpdesk, reduce costs, all at the same time?
Laird: One of the solutions we looked at in Poland, certainly around automation, was a really
simple challenge that the operations team had as part of our Polish operation. Every morning,
backups from a particular customer was taking them in the region of one hour to produce a
backup report, look at the backup that had failed, re-run backups as appropriate, and then if
backups had failed maybe consistently for a couple of days, escalating that out to support team.
We automated the whole thing. It’s all automated using HPE Operations Orchestration. The
whole process now takes one of the team about five minutes in the morning, and it’s really a case
of checking the output from the system.
So, we've saved somewhere in the region of just under an hour everyday for one person. It
probably took two or three days to code the solution, but we're saving a significant amount of
time every day. We're getting a much better quality report, and we're able to pass that information
out to our second-line and third-line teams earlier in the day, it gives them much more time to fix
things.
One of the things that we've looked at now is automating the re-run of backups overnight. Rather
than letting them go to maybe two or three days, they're fixed overnight, and we run them within
the backup window. It's improving quality to the customer and a having significant impact on
savings to the operations team.
Page 8

9. Gardner: You mentioned the use of the HPE tools. Are there any other HPE platforms or
approaches that are helping you bring in this common data. We talked about the analysis earlier
that also helps in this equation of doing more with less.
HPE partner
Laird: We're an HPE partner. We have been for over 10 years now, and we have quite a range
of PE tools across the portfolio, whether that’s from things like the Application Lifecycle
Manager, through to HPE Service Manager.
We also have solutions like OMi doing things like event correlation, where we have events
coming in from the monitoring solutions, whether that’s from HPE SiteScope or Operations
Manager or from third party tools, like SCCM and some of the Nagios tools.
OMi is correlating those events and passing through to the service desk and the operations center
the ones that actually need to be looked at. We're filtering out more than 50 percent, 60 percent of
the alerts. It reduces our cost. We're filtering those alerts out at a much earlier point in the chain,
and with that, we're only raising incidents for ones that actually need to be escalated up to the
teams.
We're using tools and technology, to keep costs down and reduce the costs as far as we can.
Gardner: So as we think about being able to future-proof the support services, and by that I
mean being able to adapt to a millennial audience, more distribution points, more types of
helpdesk and automation, and that single portal, we also need to be thinking about being
backwards compatible. Some organizations do want more of that human touch, the interactions,
and perhaps some of the government organizations are interested in that as well.
What is it about the future direction of your services at Sopra Steria, some of the tools and
technologies that you are employing from HPE, that allows you to feel confident about being
both future proof and backwards compatible for your support?
Blackeby: One of the challenges that are coming more to the forefront these days is probably the
adoption of cloud services. It’s a disruptive influence on traditional IT and how IT is delivered.
It’s a challenge for us the service providers to adapt to these. You're talking about environments
that can be built in minutes, bringing a whole new way of working, very fluid environments with
auto-scaling where the number of resources that we are supporting and managing is growing and
shrinking dynamically over time. So that’s really had a big sort of impact on how we deliver
service.
We've recognized this and are looking at how we transform the service delivery. We're becoming
more reliant on the data that supports the service. So it’s very much around how we manage
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10. what’s out there, with a heavy reliance on things like configuration management systems, and
discovery of IT resources.
As Mark said, there are things like event correlation, looking at patterns, trends and events so
that we can increase the agility and really manage much higher volumes of applications, of
servers and of users with a smaller number of people or with the same number of people.
Gardner: It is very exciting a lot is going on.
Tools and technologies
Blackeby: As a ratio you might have a scenario of a support person looking after an average 40
servers to now having to deal with realms of managing, so there is a 100-plus servers, but it’s
only through the deployment of the tools and technologies that we can do that.
But at the same time we still have a large legacy estate and legacy clients and we still need to
support. So it’s really looking at how come we engineer our processes so that irrespective of
what we are talking about legacy physical server workloads or perhaps on premise virtualized
workloads as well as things that might be spun up inside Amazon Web Services or in Microsoft
Azure public cloud environments that we provide that consistent level of service and service
delivery irrespective of where the service is located or in which format it is delivered back to the
customer or users.
Gardner: When I speak to developer organizations and IT production organizations operations,
they're seeing a compression and a large degree of collaboration between development and
operations. Thus, the DevOps trend.
But when I listen to you, I'm hearing also a compression between operations and helpdesk in
such a way that it benefits the entire IT process in a more automated and the more software-
defined and the more data that’s made available, the tighter that compression seems to get. Am I
perhaps describing seeing this idea of helpdesk, support and operations becoming more
collaborative, more tightly aligned?
Laird: The whole concept of the operations team being hidden away in a back room and the
service desk being the public face is changing. They're becoming much more tightly aligned.
Things that the operations team is doing have an almost immediate impact on what the service
desk is looking at, and the service desk needs to have access to really all the information the
operations team has got.
When the user is on the phone and has a problem with a service, it’s good if the service desk can
actually say, "Yes, we know there's a problem and we know what the problem is. We have an
estimated fix time of 15 minutes." That gives the user the warm feeling that you're in control and
you know what you're doing.
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11. Gardner: Well great. I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how
automation, self service and analytics are combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less.
And we’ve seen how automation and ITSM-driven insights endow helpdesk personnel with more
knowledge and provide a single point of support for end users regardless of their needs, whether
it’s self-service or more of the traditional way of reaching support.
So, join me please in thanking our guests. We've been here today with David Blackeby, Program
Solutions Owner for Cloud Services at Sopra Steria. Thanks so much, David.
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Blackeby: Thank you.
Gardner: And we’ve also been joined by Diana Wosik, Group Program Manager at Sopra Steria
in Poland. Thank you so much, Diana.
Wosik: Thanks to you.
Gardner: And also thanks to Mark Laird, Group Technical Architect at Sopra Steria in the UK.
Thank you, Mark.
Laird: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this IT-support thought
leadership discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back
next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how automation, self service, and analytics are
combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2016. All rights reserved.
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