[51CTO.com Special Report] User Frustrations
For network administrators, our requirements are actually quite simple: no network outages, no system crashes, and no data loss. These three points form the foundation of our work. However, the gap between ideal and reality is often quite large. In practice, network management is plagued by issues like periodic work interruptions caused by unclear management workflows, duplicated efforts due to lack of process integration, inconsistent service delivery from poorly defined processes, and frequent errors stemming from ambiguous responsibility assignments. These problems constantly trouble network administrators. To address them, the ITSM methodology was born.
Putting ITSM into Practice
ITSM is a methodology, and to put it into practice, supporting software is required for implementation. Currently, various brands of ITSM systems are available on the market, and Broadview COSS 3.0 from Guangtong Communication & Information stands out as a particularly excellent product among them.
Broadview COSS 3.0 adopts ITIL theory to unify people, technology, and processes. From a functional perspective, Broadview COSS 3.0 covers the functionalities involved in ITSM, including unified operational presentation, service desk, incident management, problem management, change and release management, daily operational tasks and outsourcing service management, configuration and asset management, service level management, and knowledge base. Moreover, the system is flexible in purchase and deployment, supports complex workflows and high-level integration, and meets regulatory and compliance requirements.
With Broadview COSS 3.0, network administrators can centrally view system monitoring, network monitoring, application monitoring, and business views all at once, establishing a link between the underlying network and upper-layer application services. When an application system encounters a problem, administrators can effectively identify which network fault caused the issue.
At the same time, Broadview COSS 3.0 provides an operations management portal for the network management department鈥攖he service desk. Through this service desk, administrators can organize tasks like operational duty shifts, fault monitoring, request reception, work order dispatch, and monitoring during the problem resolution process into structured workflows. This way, when a network fault occurs, the network management department can handle it step by step according to procedure. Essentially, the “service desk” function provides a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for all requests. With this point of contact, network users and administrators can effectively collaborate. In other words, the “service desk” function ensures that network administrators and users are no longer isolated from each other; they can communicate effectively through the service desk.
In the past, network management heavily relied on individual personnel. In an organization, if there was a personnel change in network management, the new administrator would face a long “adaptation period.” This is because network management relies on experience in aspects like network architecture, mapping relationships between network and applications, and relevant fault causes. Broadview COSS 3.0’s “knowledge base” feature can automatically summarize these management experiences, forming a comprehensive “daily work system.” Through the knowledge base, Broadview COSS 3.0 helps support staff at all levels improve their skills, simplifies IT service tasks, and reduces reliance on specific individuals. For some simple network faults, the knowledge base can even perform automatic troubleshooting, significantly simplifying the workload for administrators.
Many network administrators can relate to the fact that much of the work in network management is repetitive and routine. These repetitive tasks consume significant time and energy but must still be done. To address this, Broadview COSS 3.0 from Guangtong manages daily operational maintenance work, unifying periodic and relatively fixed routine maintenance tasks under one system. It replaces manual labor by automatically completing these repetitive tasks on time.
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