More technical considerations for Self-Service (part 2)

This blog part 2 continues the discussion on technical considerations for Self-Service and lists additional key aspects to successfully deploy Self-Service.

• Assure Personalization
  • Tailors content, site pages, layout, look & feel, components for the individual user when logging in.
  • Identity and authorization is important for sensitive user information & interaction.
  • Two kinds of personalization
    • Explicit personalization is driven fixed & static rules, user attributes, profile information & demographics, …
    • Implicit personalization is driven by dynamic rules and attributes such as type of device accessed from, existing customer status, products & services owned, previous clicks…
• Integrate with Identity management technologies
  • Assure connections and availability with authentication & authorization for securing user sessions
  • At minimum directory services (LDAP) and access management - Single Sign On (SSO)  and Federation Management - integration are required
  • Better are more sophisticated access control policies with integration of specialized tools for security auditing, compliance, role management, and policy administration
• Assure application-level security
  • Grant appropriate access for administrators and developers to pages/ components within the site
  • Assure Application integration to translate transactional functionality into experience
• Application Component Development
  • Component development
    • Component development allows for authorizing and deployment of independent micro-applications surfaced within the self-service pages.
    • These components are often referred to as portlets if they are built as standard JSR168/ 286 applications.
    • Widgets and Gadgets are another common component type.
  • Enable Inter-component Communication/ Events
    • Allows page components to interact with each other to create a unified user experience. A user click or entered data within one component triggers an event with another component or backend applications.
• Drive Content Integration
  • Allow for content publishing and management (articles, descriptions, documents,…) within the context of the site.
  • Cross Site Search searches within context of the portal application.
  • Use of search crawlers can be more difficult with custom application components.

The graphic as well as content from Oracle white papers has been incorporated into this article.

Step-by-step process and practical advice to build Self-Service

There is power in simplicity. The Kiss principle (Keep it simple, Smart!) helps to make the Self-Service Journey a success.

In this article I leverage thoughts from a white paper issued by FreshService (a customer support solution provider) and propose 8 practical steps for building Self-Service.

1. Design
   1. Know your users – cannot design something for people before you know them first.
   2. Understand the unique requirements of your work force – diversity, culture, international particularities, individual requirements
   3. Observe the 4Cs of marketing – consumer, communication, convenience and communication
2. Deploy
   1. Create a concrete launch plan for your new self-service processes.
   2. Employ user portals, forums, newsletters, posters to get the word out:
      1. Educate users on deployments
      2. Establish value delivered by new processes and ability to take the concepts further
   3. Establish an early adopter user group to understand strengths & weaknesses of your offer and preemptively fix problems based on informed, constructive feedback.
3. Sustain
   1. Service management projects requires people to go the extra mile.
   2. Observe the three E’s: Engage, evaluate and evolve:
      1. Engage users in meaningful conversations through internal communities and social networks.
      2. Engaged users are the first step on the road to permanence.
      3. Encourage and truly value feedback regardless whether positive or negative.
         1. Be aware if you are not getting enough feedback. This is the biggest warning sign that you may have lost some engaged users.
4. Measure and improve
   1. Establish meaningful, right metrics. Choose carefully – rather focus on the key metrics. Avoid getting lost in too much information.
   2. Analyze how users interact with the portal. Investigate which information, content and knowledge articles are mostly requested out of the service catalog and databases.
   3. Understand and drill down on problems that plague users.
   4. Use advanced analytics. Even Google Analytics can generate valuable insight when using an ITSM cloud software.
5. Cross Sell
   1. In large organizations, especially new hires, are often not aware of services that they are entitled to.
   2. Employees often then find their own work around ways to get things accomplished, resulting in poor business efficiency or facilitating shadow IT.
   3. The self-service portal is an excellent way to start fixing communication problems.
6. Leverage
   1. The self-service portal can perform an abundance of functions across the organization:
      1. Make announcements and inform users of exact services that they are eligible.
      2. Offers platform for different business & support functions to showcase/ offer their services
   2. The service catalog is ideal when it starts to function more like an online shopping website.
      1. Learn from e-commerce vendors to boost functionality and utility of company’s service catalog.
         1. Use cross-selling techniques to suggest related services and solutions.
7. Empower your users
   1. Best IT and other support happens are empowered to solve problems on their own.
   2. It reduces load on service desk, cuts costs and exponentially increases service desk efficiency.
8. Optimize
   1. Drive standardization of self-service processes and eliminate inconsistencies.
   2. Streamline the design, deployment and management of your self-service processes.