Sostenuto ITSM

With Sostenuto, we offer an easy, flexible way of logging, tracking and resolving incidents, while automating as much as possible, in order to maximise efficiency: prioritisation of incidents, service level tracking, notifications to support analysts throughout the incident lifecycle via ticker-bar announcements, SMS texts or customisable e-mails.  

All of the standard fields as suggested by ITIL are there, but unlike other rigid systems, you choose what fields are visible and what information you want to gather. Fields not applicable to each process simply don’t appear on the screen – nothing is greyed out in Sostenuto. Other features include:

• Email or self service portal logging options
• Detailed incident logs with full histories, including all customer interactions
• View associated configuration items with full history
• Assign incidents to groups, individuals and even third parties for external resolution.
• Natural language searching knowledge base
• Customer survey facilities

Sostenuto provides the ability to track Operation Level Agreements (OLAs), internal processes such as requests for software or hardware, which together form the lifecycle of the SLA. You can then analyse this data to view a breakdown of incidents and associated costs.

Sostenuto clearly separates incidents and problems, and creates links between the two. So, if you have ten people calling about a faulty printer (x10 incidents), a problem is raised to deal with the issue and solve it long-term. Once the issue has been resolved, as you close the problem, all ten incidents are closed and populated with the fix details. Neat, tidy, smart working.

• User communities are notified automatically regarding known problems via email or ticker
• Dedicated problem database supported by a natural language searching knowledge base
• Integration with change management allows problems to be tracked through to their ultimate origin – particularly where these are caused by the rollout of other applications or upgrades.
• Truly assess financial impacts of problems and manage resources more effectively by recording resource utilisation and costs accrued in the resolution of the problem.

Keeping control of SLAs is a critical element of successfully delivering against key performance indicators and ensuring continued customer satisfaction.  Sostenuto allows you to:

• Assign SLAs to end-users, assets, departments, incident or problem profiles
• Create base targets against known priorities and hours of support, excluding unsupported days such as public holidays, from critical SLA timing calculations
• Receive alerts when your SLAs have expired and make changes to the SLAs you have
• Create a hierarchy of SLAs for preferred customers, VIPs etc
• Undertake reporting and analysis of overall performance achievement against SLA targets
• Generate reminders of impending SLA target failures and automate incident escalations based on SLA timing statistics

Sostenuto provides a central store for all configuration items be they hardware, software, IT services or anything in between, allowing the linking of all such configuration items to people, departments, locations and other services as required.

• Integrates with network asset tool Certero AssetStudio™ as standard or can be integrated with the tool of your choice to help you create the database
• Powerful ‘association’ capabilities link configuration items to each other, enabling easy navigation through the support infrastructure, helping understand the impact of changes
• Both internal and third party contacts may be stored within the contacts service with the capture of information appropriate to the type of contact
• Graphical representation provides users with a tool to visualize the elements of their CMDB and the associations between them

With Sostenuto, you can have a complete view of each supplier, receive live updates and exchange information to ensure full track and trace visibility of their actions.

Third parties can be assigned their own SLAs which are recorded and measured independently of your internal SLAs and when something goes wrong, you could be sent an automatically generated e-mail, pinpointing what has gone wrong and showing who is responsible. The system also works in reverse by showing you who the best performing suppliers are, giving you more justification for working with them again.

Sostenuto also allows the addition of new access points to support suppliers gaining visibility of specific information on orders, customers, projects or any other element of Sostenuto as required. This facility ensures immediate access for all third parties to the right information at the right time.

Sostenuto lets you track knowledge information such as symptoms, cause and resolution details in order to better resolve incidents, problems and manage change requests.

• Automatic creation of a knowledge item based on what has been filled out on the incident form
• Define who can see, create and publish knowledge items
• Add attachments, such as PDFs, Word and Excel documents
• Define how the knowledge is displayed, from recently added, to most popular, or by subject
• Access the knowledge base directly from the incident, so it auto populates any information from the knowledge article. This means that the knowledge base is truly integrated, not a bolt on where you copy and paste your question.

Many service desk products simply take an incident screen, alter the wording of the fields, and say that it supports change management. Sostenuto does it properly, offering a service which reflects the change management process as it is supposed to be managed.

Changes rely on multiple occurrences, with multiple inter-dependencies. You’ll want to define the job, then list the steps that have to occur. The change won’t be closed until all the stages have completed. You’ll want to define who is authorised to make the changes, and to rank the significance of the change. You’ll want a clear picture of who will be affected by the change and you’ll want to inform everyone involved when and what things are happening.

When someone moves the goal posts, as always happens during changes, you’ll want to make alterations to the change process. Sostenuto lets you do all this:

• Automate many common IT change requests and track
• Record the change impact, justification, severity, risks and backout scripts
• Initiate, approve, implement and verify change requests, with appropriate information flowing to affected parties and approvers through email
• Flexible task model allows complex changes to be broken down into component actions and allocated to the relevant individuals for action
• Business case justification process ensures change requests are commercially and technically appropriate for the business, helping to eliminate errors.

Sostenuto works just the way ITIL says you should work, allowing you to achieve a greater control of all aspects of release management, but without the hard work.

Accurate information, resource planning and management are all essential components of release management. Sostenuto allows a holistic overview of how a release impacts all other areas of the service desk. Records are kept up to date with all change requests relating to each release being centrally stored and updated.

Key milestones relating to each release can be flagged, with automatic alerts being sent to interested parties when key dates are reached. Training and documentation updates can be scheduled around key release dates, again with email notification where appropriate.

Through careful and controlled processes around release management, reductions in costs can be seen, through better utilisation of IT resources, ensuring a greater quality of release as well as an overall reduction of the length of time taken to roll out each release.

Managing thousands of contracts spanning hundreds of partners and suppliers can be a time consuming process.

Sostenuto includes a framework from which your contracts can be managed easily and efficiently. You can manage contracts centrally and tie them to partners and the services or equipment they provide.

Sostenuto will define the process of internal and legal review of each contract state such as suspension, termination and expiration. Enter names, start date, end date, licensing details, maintenance terms and days for all the applications and relationships that will impact you. It is possible to receive automatic notifications of contract deadlines and costs and keep on top of the critical workload of contract negotiations.

Contract management on its own provides a strong business case for Sostenuto by revealing the thousands of pounds wasted on licences that are not used or allowing you to renegotiate contracts.

With Sostenuto’s order management, it is possible to store information on the complete lifecycle of equipment across the organisation. Sostenuto works in conjunction with your existing buying systems, allowing you to track what is being purchased and offering a list of all the products that can be ordered.

Sostenuto ITSM holds and cross references all data relating to purchasing, such as current and historic price information, approved products lists, part numbers, order status, split deliveries, signatories and the ultimate destination of equipment. Integration with asset register tools mean that the entire lifecycle of all equipment can be monitored and managed from a single place.

Used in conjunction with order management, the product module underpins the procurement process and acts as an approved price list of products available to purchase.

Information captured for each product includes the supplier, part numbers, unit cost, VAT indicator, last purchase date, last purchase price as well as the expected lead time for the part allowing analysis and further negotiation on costs. In fact, should the list price change this will be automatically recorded in the history of the product.

• Quick creation of new configuration items based on the products ordered as and when they arrive from the supplier and are booked into stock
• Products can be superseded or discontinued
• Ability to restrict and enforce specific buying behavior, allowing consistency of purchasing

Event Management enables you to define rules for the actions required by events, specifying the type of threshold which will trigger the event rule and initiate a change or an incident as appropriate. Events coming into Sostenuto associate to the event threshold record which in turn automatically links the record to the configuration item (CI) involved in the event.

Sostenuto’s event management allows different types of analysis and trending such as event breaches by item type and individual item trending on the specific thresholds.

Service portfolio management maps the charting of a business service from the very beginning to the point of going live. It enables the successful implementation of a service by preparing and planning the people, processes, products (such as services and technology) and the partners (third parties) involved with it.  

Continually monitoring the development stages of a business idea helps prevent a lack of clarity and direction which could cause the project to overrun its time and budget, or to suffer from lack of resources.

• Services are grouped into business services, technical services or a combination of both.
• The entire lifecycle of all services is broken down into service pipeline (proposed/in development), service catalogue (live/available) and retired. 
• It has the following distinct phases: Definition, Analysis, Chartering, Design, Development, Build and Testing. You can create tasks for any of these phases and assign them to the most appropriate personnel for completion.

ITIL V3 introduces a dedicated process to ensure that that a service catalogue is produced and maintained, containing accurate information on all operational services and those being prepared to be run operationally. Service catalogue management provides vital information for all other service management processes: service details, current status and the services' interdependencies.

Sostenuto provides the functionality to create and sustain your own service catalogue, allowing you to monitor and analyse multiple support service OLAs (operation level agreements) which together make up your outward facing business service SLAs (service level agreements).

When you create a service contract in Sostenuto you make associations between:

• The customer (that is, the department)
• The service (defined in service management), which provides a range of service offerings for the customer. You can bundle services together in packages using the Graphical Association viewer, allowing a hierarchy of services, each of which contains service offerings. Service offerings define the facilities within a service that are contracted to a department or a customer.
• The support level agreement for that service - the higher the support level, the more service offerings are available.