Attivio IT Knowledge Expert Solution Improves Support Staff Service Performance and Reduces Cost-Per-Ticket

Tuesday, January 24, 2012 - Company Release

Unified Information Access Goes Beyond ITIL to Bring Unstructured and Structured Information Together to Replace Time-Wasting, Manual Hunt-and-Gather Efforts

The challenge of managing IT incidents is draining IT staff resources, wasting money and slowing down the resolution process. Attivio, creator of the Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE), the leading unified information access platform, introduces IT Knowledge Expert — a single, aggregated and fully connected view into all relevant support information. IT Knowledge Expert presents all unstructured content and structured data in one dashboard to resolve IT incidents faster, reduce cost-per-ticket, number of tickets and service level agreement (SLA) penalties and ease the burdens of high employee turnover that plague the IT support industry.

Despite advances made through adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) framework and IT services management (ITSM) tools, to resolve issues support analysts typically must access multiple silos of information — not just structured data that ITIL and ITSM tools address, but content from system logs, vendor documentation, wikis, PDFs, SharePoint, websites and other sources.

The result is prolonged downtimes that lead to lost sales, dissatisfied customers, violated SLAs and low service team morale that ultimately leads to hefty training costs for new hires.

Attivio's IT Knowledge Expert breaks down these silos and easily integrates with existing enterprise systems, enabling secure access, navigation and discovery of all information relevant to a service management issue, including:

• Service databases (known errors, incident/problem/change data, configuration management data, etc.);
• System metrics data;
• Application log files (XML, TXT, etc.) including conditions before, during and after an incident/problem;
• Application manuals, programming documentation, wikis, email and file documents of all types (PDF, MS Word, MS Excel, Visio, etc.) anywhere within or external to the organization, including SharePoint repositories, content management systems, websites and RSS feeds;
• Personnel databases identifying organizational profiles, subject matter experts and key system stakeholders.

"Companies today wage battles with incident resolution times, escalation rates, staff frustration and support costs," said Fred Broussard, Research Director of Enterprise System Infrastructure Software at IDC. "Much of this frustration is a result of time wasted going from silo to silo gathering information and still not receiving the clarity needed to resolve issues. Unified information access can help remove this uncertainty, and potentially do it with the speed and efficiency to enable organizations to solve problems faster and at a lower cost."

Best practices and recommendations for the convergence, joining and presentation of enterprise information with high levels of volume, velocity, variety and complexity are discussed in a new Attivio IT Knowledge Expert whitepaper available here.

"IT Knowledge Expert connects the dots between the multiple databases and repositories used by IT support specialists to resolve incidents, identify problem-solving root causes, manage system changes and avoid ‘system collisions' in ways traditional solutions cannot match," said Sid Probstein, Attivio CTO. "Our customers are seeing reductions in mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of up to 40%, as well as significant improvements in cost-per-ticket and customer satisfaction."

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