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Help Desk Help
New Alternatives for More Effective
Economical Support
white paper
INFO@SERVICE-NOW.COM

2. HELP DESK HELP - WHITE PAPER
Table of Contents
Help Desk Help: New Alternatives for More Effective, Economical Support 1
Service-now.com; A Happy Ending at Juniper Networks 1
Arizona Public Service: The Power to Change for the Better 3
Next Steps: Check it Out for Your Help Desk 4
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Help Desk Help: New Alternatives for More Effective, Economical Support
At a growing number of businesses, help desks need help themselves. For years, companies needing to resolve IT inci-
dents and problems have relied on traditional help desk systems. Among the most popular of these has been HP's Serv-
ice Desk offering, part of that company's venerable OpenView IT management portfolio. However, in recent months HP
Service Desk users have been plagued by uncertainty concerning the future of the offering.
This is a significant challenge, in large part because those businesses are increasingly dependent upon their IT-enabled
business applications, information and infrastructures, even as these become more distributed and technologically di-
verse. At many companies, initiatives such as service-oriented architecture and cloud computing promise to help by con-
solidating, integrating and reducing overall complexity of enterprise IT and business infrastructures. In the meantime,
however, such initiatives often exacerbate management and support challenges as users and administrators alike adapt
to frequently changing resources.
To be sure, many companies are enjoying significant business benefits from their investments in modern, IT-enabled
business applications and solutions. However, to make sure no users are left behind by modernization efforts, businesses
must provide effective IT support and service management.
Meanwhile, HP has announced that it is superseding Service Desk, replacing it with an offering known as Service
Manager. This latter product is supposedly based on more modern technologies and is more capable and aligned with
today's IT management challenges, according to HP. However, users indicate that Service Manager appears poised to be
far more costly than Service Desk. In addition, HP requires that users of older Service Desk versions must upgrade to the
current release to smooth their migrations to Service Manager. And the latest release of Service Desk is less reliable and
predictable than its predecessors, those users say.
Many HP Service Desk users are therefore now faced with what seems to be a Hobson's Choice – sticking with an older
but more stable version of Service Desk that HP will soon no longer support, or moving to a newer version supported by
HP but hobbled by bugs and instability.
Fortunately, alternatives do exist. One such alternative from Service-now.com, offers comprehensive functionality, flexibil-
ity and aggressive cost-effectiveness that adapts to users' specific needs and grows with them. And because the
Service-now.com solution is built on the Internet and delivered via software-as-a-service (SaaS), it eliminates the high im-
plementation and management costs and complexities associated with traditional client / server software like HP Service
Manager and BMC Remedy. Service-now.com makes IT service management easy to start, easy to grow, easy to custom-
ize and easy to afford. It also helps the companies using it save resources on managing infrastructure and supporting
software, and to shift those resources to supporting users and the business, the reasons those companies have IT service
management in the first place.
Service-now.com; A Happy Ending at Juniper Networks
Chris Terzian is the IT senior technical lead at leading network infrastructure and services provider Juniper Networks.
Juniper was growing quickly and Chris and his team decided the company needed a long-term service desk solution and
began to explore alternatives.
Years ago, Terzian's team identified a developer and began working with them to build a browser-based solution. They
spent approximately a year and a half moving down that path, only to have senior management decide that the company
needed a more scalable and functional alternative, from a more established and better-known vendor. However, before
they were able to line up options for evaluation, the company got a new CIO. “He came in and said, 'We're going to use
HP Service Desk. It's what we used at my last company, and it's what we're going to use here,'” Terzian said.
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Juniper originally implemented HP Service Desk version 4.5, and found it relatively stable, albeit perhaps not as functional
or flexible as the custom-built alternative first considered. However, HP soon announced that Service Desk 5.x was the
only “officially sanctioned” release that enabled the transition to the then-forthcoming Service Manager offering. And Serv-
ice Desk 5.x turned out to be a “painful decision,” according to Terzian.
“HP promised it would provide a smooth migration path to Service Manager. But the year following our decision to imple-
ment Service Desk 5.x was basically a blur. As soon as we went live, I was on the phone at least once a day with HP. On
many days, almost as soon as I set my foot in my car and started driving down the freeway for home, I got a call saying
the software had crashed. We even had HP development teams come out and work with us to try to resolve problems.
They put a lot of resources to work for us, but it was like trying to plug a hole in a dam with a Band-Aid,” Terzian remem-
bered.
Once again, he and his team began exploring alternatives, including those from all of the “big-name” providers. Soon, he
and his team discovered Service-now.com, a young and little-known vendor when first encountered by Juniper. However,
Service-now.com warranted a recommendation to Juniper senior management from a senior analyst at a leading IT advi-
sory services provider.
Initial doubts quickly gave way to enthusiasm. “When I first saw Service-now.com, I was not initially excited, because we'd
always depended on-premise applications and I was skeptical of the SaaS model. However, I was quickly blown away by
the solution. It took me back to the days when we were trying to build our own application, but Service-now.com had taken
our ideas several steps further,” Terzian said.
He added that Juniper's engineers were also initially dubious. Previous applications didn't work with the browsers the en-
gineers preferred, or required the use of fat-client software those engineers disdained. “We were worried about how they'd
react to Service-now.com, but they loved it. It was the first time engineering was excited about an application we'd pro-
vided to them,” according to Terzian.
Service-now.com delighted the doubters at Juniper because it offered superior functionality and flexibility and a powerful
yet easy-to-navigate user interface. Ironically, the problems Juniper had experienced with HP Service Desk 5.x also aided
and accelerated the transition to Service-now.com. “HP Service Desk 5.x was actually a blessing in disguise. The prob-
lems we had drove us to do more comprehensive planning and preparation for a configuration management database
(CMDB) which helped us implement Service-now.com rapidly and easily. We might have put up with the pain and limited
flexibility of 4.x because at least it was stable, but 5.x forced us to find something else,” Terzian said.
Despite limited resources and a team of only four people, Terzian and his staff completed implementation of
Service-now.com within a couple of months.“Help from Service-now.com was invaluable to our planning and basic imple-
mentation. Every time we had a request, they'd be on it, a trend that continues today. With the HP tool, we spent a lot of
time and effort working around limitations. With Service-now.com, we could accomplish what we wanted to accomplish.”
Those goals included better reporting, more transparency, greater insight into performance of both the infrastructure and
the support team, and the ability to be more proactive, Terzian said. “With HP, we were stuck in firefighting mode for a
year. With Service-now.com, we were able to start planning, enhancing processes and rolling out new modules such as
problem management. We unplugged HP Service Desk and had the migration completed shortly afterward.” To date,
Juniper has implemented the Service-now.com incident and problem modules. Imminent future plans likely include addi-
tion of the Service-now.com change and service catalog modules.
And what advice would Chris Terzian give those reconsidering current HP Service Desk deployments? “If you like being
on the phone 24/7, and you need friends or stress that badly, stick with HP Service Desk. Otherwise, move to
Service-now.com Things may be quieter, but you'll sleep better, as I am.”
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Arizona Public Service: The Power to Change for the Better
Arizona Public Service is that state's largest electric utility, serving more than one million customers. APS was recently
named the number one energy utility for IT innovation according to the 2008 InformationWeek 500. Pinnacle West/APS
also ranked among the top ten overall U.S. companies and highest among those based in Arizona. Margaret Melisko, Ari-
zona Public Service group manager of enterprise systems and application development support, leads a 60-person team
within a 400-person IT staff that supports approximately 7,000 employees.
Four groups report to Melisko and support different areas of the company's infrastructure: databases; application devel-
opment and support; middleware; and infrastructure applications. The infrastructure applications group utilizes an IT serv-
ice management solution as the principal tool to help information services adhere to the popular Information Technology
Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines.
For about five years the company has been working to implement an effective incident management system. “We needed
technology to support our existing processes,” Melisko said.
Melisko and her team faced a significant upgrade of their existing ITSM tool and decided to consider solution alternatives.
“At the time, our internal team was very prejudiced to the incumbent and not receptive to looking at alternatives.
“We felt it was our responsibility to provide the best to the company, and you don’t know that you have the best unless you
look at all the options. Everybody wanted to do what was right for the company,” said Melisko.
So Melisko put together a team that spent three months defining the requirements for their ITSM solution. They came up
with about 400 functional requirements and related considerations, including all of the ITIL-related processes that required
technology support. “Our people had a vested interest in the outcome of this vendor analysis because many of them
would be working in the tool all day, every day. We had more interested stakeholders in this project than many other pro-
jects,” Melisko affirmed.
Eventually, Arizona Public Service decided on a short list of vendors that included Service-now.com. The company heard
about Service-now.com from another utility through their participation in an industry consortium.
Arizona Public Service sent out a request for information (RFI) with a set of “change lifecycle” scenarios to each of the
vendor candidates. Each had a day to do a presentation and a demo for Melisko's team. “Because of the interest level, we
had about 25 people from across information services attending these demos. Going into the demos, the majority of peo-
ple had already selected a winner and it was not Service-now.com,” she said.
However, Service-now.com “absolutely blew everyone away,” according to Melisko. “They were very well prepared, fol-
lowed the scenarios, and gave an all-live demo. Not slideware. Not 'yes we can do it but we can’t show you how.' It con-
vinced the majority of the critics and we had instant converts.”
Concerns remained about switching to a SaaS solution. Those concerns included information integrity and availability,
performance, confidentiality and control over a CMDB not located on company premises. The CIO, among others, ques-
tioned whether an external company could provide the performance or security Arizona Public Service could provide in-
ternally. However, all of these concerns were eventually determined to be unfounded or were outweighed by the strengths
and benefits of the Service-now.com solution, according to Melisko.
One of the things that most impressed Melisko and her team during the Service-now.com demo was the solution's Web
2.0 user interface. “This was not a legacy system with a Web front end. Service-now.com was able to do it right from the
beginning,” Melisko said.
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Another strongly convincing factor was six Arizona Public Service staffers attending Knowledge, the Service-now.com an-
nual user group meeting. “They got to talk to employees and current customers. They all came back so excited and
jazzed,” according to Melisko.
Another powerful convincer was Service-now.com support, before and after the sale. This included multiple conference
calls during the design process, and setting up an instance of the solution specifically for the Arizona Public Service team.
This allowed users at the utility to explore the solution under “real-life” conditions. “They had never been able to test drive
the car before,” Melisko said of her team members.
With doubts and concerns addressed effectively, the utility has opted for a big-bang approach, planning to implement the
Service-now.com incident, change, configuration, and problem modules simultaneously. Service catalog will be imple-
mented later. The plan intends to avoid duplication of tools and ensure everything is based on a single CMDB. The initial
modules go live in Jan. 2009.
The utility also plans to integrate Service-now.com with several other management solutions, including HP OpenView
monitoring tools, as well as Oracle PeopleSoft for HR, Microsoft Active Directory and Lightweight Data Access Protocol
(LDAP) for authentication, and IBM FileNet for document management of detailed design drawings and project plans. The
company will be using Service-now.com discovery for asset inventory and dependency mapping.
“With Service-now.com, we built our existing processes and best practices right into the tool. Service-now.com is like Tur-
boTax,” Melisko said. “You don’t need to know all the tax laws to use it. With Service-now.com, you don’t need to know all
the processes to follow them. We can now focus additional efforts on improving our processes which at the end of the day
will mean good business practices for Arizona Public Service.”
Next Steps: Check it Out for Your Help Desk
As the experiences at Juniper Networks, Arizona Public Service and numerous other companies demonstrate,
Service-now.com offers powerful, flexible, economical and effective alternatives to legacy tools for IT service manage-
ment. The Service-now.com Website offers more information and includes a live demonstration instance that does not
require registration. Help desk and IT decision-makers can also explore the Service-now.com wiki and an online forum
that connects users, developers and Service-now.com company executives.
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