Product overview

IBM Control Desk for Service Providers is an integrated service management solution that helps you manage a comprehensive range of IT processes, services, and assets for multiple customers. The product leverages best-practice Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-aligned processes to help you manage an IT landscape that is becoming more complex, virtualized, distributed, social, and diverse. As part of IBM’s Smarter Infrastructure initiative, IBM Control Desk for Service Providers helps you to optimize the performance of your infrastructure and workforce, in alignment with your overall business objectives. You get the control to maintain configuration integrity in response to planned changes and unplanned incidents and problems occurring across this complex IT landscape, ensuring continuity of service, speed of response, and efficiency of management. The product features innovative, industry-leading functionality in many areas, including:
  • A simple, easy-to-use service catalog and self service interface
  • Tools for easily reporting problems and requesting services
  • Applications that enable IT staff to be productive and responsive in prioritizing, tracking, and resolving end-user issues
  • ITIL-aligned change, configuration, release, incident, problem, and asset management
  • Integrated service, asset, and configuration management
  • Built-in integrations with IBM and third-party applications
  • Policy-based automation of job plans, task assignments, notifications, and workflows to reduce labor costs
  • Advanced analytics tools that provide insight into your environment and help you manage change more efficiently

A range of applications and features created specifically for service providers enable you to manage service as a business more profitably. You can manage customer agreements, efficiently determining what services should be provided to each customer and under what conditions; price services using clearly defined rules; and manage SLA response commitments. Timely, detailed, accurate billing with customer pre-approval results in reduced days of sales outstanding (DSOs).

In addition, you can strictly segment data by customer to ensure that only authorized customers and internal users can view information about each customer. This product enables you to effectively manage end-to-end IT, operations, and business processes, to deliver efficient and effective services aligned to your and your customers' business goals.

The product enables you to perform basic system configurations, rather than coding, to quickly adapt the product user interface, data model, and workflows to your particular environment and business needs. Rapid Environment Setup (REST) application programming interfaces enable you to easily integrate with internal applications.

Throughout this documentation, IBM Control Desk for Service Providers is referred to as IBM Control Desk. These two products are identical, with the exception that the Service Provider edition provides comprehensive features for managing the data centers of multiple customers.

IBM Control Desk offers improved visibility of your infrastructure; increased control of resources, processes, and changes; and automation to reduce costs and improve the consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness of crucial processes.

IBM Control Desk stores a wealth of data about services – incidents, problems, service requests, assets, CIs, and more. Integrations based on Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) enable you to link to data stored in other sources, acting as a consolidator and organizer rather than storing additional copies of data. You can use out-of-the-box reports or create your own reports to use stored and linked data to identify error-prone processes and infrastructure. This enables you to create a Service Improvement Plan or Service Quality Plan. For example, you can view trending reports on Incidents on CIs to identify which applications or systems are most in need of upgrades. and what upgrades you can make to improve a service. Similarly, report data gives the administrator a way to monitor and enforce service quality by viewing SLA compliance across owner groups or vendors. You can also compose a report that shows the month-to-month costs of services to assist with the management of a rolling plan.

In addition to the information provided here, you can find more introductory information about this product in the planning documentation, which describes the required middleware and deployment options for your product installation.