Clarity SM Reviews

When we selected it, it gave us a framework, a structure in the space of idle, which is real important to our company because understanding how we deliver service in the areas of incident management, request management, and change management in our company are very important. The reason that they're important is because it drives our SLAs for our customers. Service Desk gave us a structure that we sorely needed to be able to deliver reporting and metrics and make sure that we're staying on time and what we promised to our customers.

CA Service Desk benefits come in the fact that it gives you some aspects of automation, which is really key to our operation. We're not a typical help desk like most companies are that use Service Desk, we're a service center. While it is only used internally by our users, it touches our customers. Therefore, it's really important that we had a tool that was going to allow us to do things in a precise manner and do it in a way that gave it the structure and the automation - keeping people on track. Instead of training everybody on thousands of business processes, it's really important that our users be able to walk in, sit down, and know what to do because the tool is driving them to do their job. Versus, the user driving themselves.

One of the biggest things we're talking with CA about is the integration between CA and PAM. PAM is a powerful tool, in fact, CA PAM is the single most important employee in our company because it basically orchestrates well over two hundred thousand operations in a month's time and it has an extremely low failure rate. One of the issues that exists, and I don't know you can really call it an issue, but it's not there yet, it needs to be tighter integration between PAM and Service Desk and they understand that, because the PAM engine for driving business automation and workflows is so critical to our business and keeping us on schedule and doing things.

Very good. Our platform is a Windows based platform. We started off initially on a Linux based platform, but we found that it was best to migrate ourselves over to a Windows based platform. Ever since we have done that our availability, our failover, it's impeccable. It has been running at an average of 99.95 consistently now for the better part of the year.

The tool allows us to adapt to many processes across our company. We have a lot of silos because of our business units. Therefore, the practices or the processes that we use to support our customers or the products differ, they're not all the same. It's very difficult when you have that many type of products to support, to make the business process for one product be the same for another. Fundamentally they might seem like they're the same, but they have all their very distinct differences. Escalation points and so on and so forth and Service Desk has allowed us to do that.

Excellent. I have a wonderful relationship with my account management team. We've had issues just like any other technology company. Nothing unusual, but I can tell you that the people that support me are there every second, every minute that we need them and they make sure that we're doing the things necessary to either get a problem resolved, or if we're doing some type of upgrade to our software, that type of thing, they will go trough every step of the way from a QA, to a dev environment, to our production environment, to make sure we're successful.

First we adopted Idle in our company. The Idle framework. We needed a tool and we chose another company, It was FrontRange. The problem with FrontRange was it didn't have enough structure to it. When you're a young company implementing Idle, and you don't have the right structure in your tracking system, you can go off in fifty million directions and we did. We recognize that, we were having problems reporting. We were having problems telling ourselves how we were doing in delivering our service.

The tool had flexibility, but it gave far too much flexibility for what we needed, so we started to look again. Then, we met with CA, we talked to them about Service Desk and we started to understand what the structure was that CA Service Desk was going to bring to us. Yet give us the flexibility that we need, which is important, but it's not too flexible, it kept you sort of boxed in, and that's not a bad thing when you're doing adopting Idle. Therefore, when we measured CA Service Desk versus the other companies that we looking at and what we already had, we found that it was going to be the best solution.

Actually, no there weren't any other options. When we went through the list, when we were doing all of our due diligence, we measured five other companies against CA and then against what we had with FrontRange and we made the decision that it wasn't even worth the effort of really sitting down and talking negotiations with the other companies.

I give it a 10/10. It's because of the impact that it's had on our business. It now tells us how we should do our work. It now tells us how we can staff. It tells us how we're doing, and it's reliable. That in itself, that's the reason why. If you're truly an adopter of Idle, the reason I would tell you to choose Service Desk is because of the structure that it comes with, and the out of box features that it gives you. Which makes the job easy for implementing Service Desk, because we migrated from FrontRange over to Service Desk.

We looked for, obviously, how does it work within the Idle framework. What kind of information do you get from it? How easy is it to report against? Metrics are key to any IT business. What about the automations, what kind of automations does it have already built in and what automations can you build in. When we were looking at the different companies that were out there, we looked for the company that was going to best meet all those criteria. Price, the cost of it, was important, but it was not the key decision.

We had a very flexible FrontRange system that had lots of data, but we were able to easily migrate all that data into Service Desk and into it's structured environment, which to me was huge. It made the job very, very easy. If you're going to look at a tool and you're going to make a decision, don't make it based upon cost. Make it based upon it's ability to deliver what you need to understanding your business and the service delivery industry.

I would say the integration to our monitoring products and to other products that we use, that's really key for us. Ease of use, it’s very easy to train. We don't have any issues with people getting in or having access problems. That's been the greatest part - it's easy to administer. Our stability has been really great. We are currently in the process of upgrading to a newer version. We have not run into any issues. We've had a great work with CA.

I would like to see probably not so many individual modules where it kind of wraps it all together. I would like to see like asset management be part of Service Desk so that I don't have to keep buying more modules, I can have everything in one.

Integration is probably one of the biggest for us. We want it to be able to integrate with everything we use so we don't have to rip and replace everything.

I would say it’s pretty good. Like I said all the integration and stuff like that really gives us the ability to scale it to whatever we need. The CA technical support has been amazing. We have had really good luck with every issue that we run into, has been resolved within probably three days. Communication has been amazing. It’s definitely top notch.

We were on a very old version of Remedy, lots of issues. Moving to CA was a pretty easy choice, cost and everything came into play. CA was definitely the right choice for us.

It’s the integration between all the different tools we currently use. Really ServiceNow was the only other. There was a lot of things that CA could do over ServiceNow that we liked. 

I would probably rate it a nine and mainly just because the fact that I would like to see more modules included in service desk. Again I keep going back to integration.

Really look at everything you use and how you can integrate those together, really evaluating that and how easy it is because everybody will tell you they can integrate and for the right amount of money, everybody can. You really want the ease of integration. We were already using Spectrum. It was an easy option there because of the fact the integration was so easy. The integration with X matters that we were already using made sense. It’s very simple and easy to do those integrations compared to having to build new APIs and stuff in order to have those integration.

Most of all is the end-user experience. In your company you have IT experienced people and non-IT experienced end-users. They need the ability to reach out, report an issue, or request something that they need to do their job. They need the ability to get that done quickly, utilize different technology other than calling a help desk, and get it done quickly, and get the metrics behind the scenes that we can report on what's going on in the environment.

Service management includes incident problem change and request. From an end-user perspective, it's more around the incident and request area where an end-user can request a service such as needing hardware, software, or accessories that they need to do their job. From an incident perspective, they might need to report an issue, if something's broken and they need it fixed, that could be with something on their workstation, and that could also include something with an application that they use to get their job done. They need the ability to report those issues and get them resolved quickly.

We did have some outages in the beginning when we were deploying the tools into our environment. A lot of it was due to perhaps not having the right hardware that was required, or the memory. You need to get the specific requirements involved to run a good solution. I think it can absolutely grow with our company. We need to look into broadening the services that we have in place today, just keep advancing and improving on those services, adding additional services to the users to make their experience good.

We've had some really good experiences with technical support, and we've had some not so great experiences with technical support, but our direct contact team at CA has been very, very helpful in getting us to the right people that can help resolve our problems quickly.

We have a lot of end-user feedback that can contribute to improvements with the tools. The way that it's designed, we have a lot of recommendations based on end-user experience that can really contribute to improving the tool for an end-user experience. The tools are very IT focused, and we just need to incorporate more of the end-user experience when designing the tool. That input could be very valuable to CA.

I don't think anything is a 10/10, I would give it an 8/10. Best practices would be absolutely involving all of your processes before implementing the tool. You have to design the tool around your processes, and then from an end-user experience you want to make sure that you have viable how-to documents that you can distribute to those customers' end-users on how to use the tools, training, if you're able to provide training to those folks, communication about what's coming, and make sure that they know how to use the tool and be successful using the tool.

The most valuable features that we're finding right now are the customer service portal and the ability to have a one stop shop experience, and that's what we're using the tool for. Been a lot of upgrades in the last year or so that have let us be much more customer friendly and create a portal that's easier for our citizens and state employees to use.

The benefits are if you go back a year, we'd have 20,000 tickets a month and we were to having to track each ticket individually and using the new integrated portal, we're able to combine those into workflows, and actually track a user's experience from the start to the finish. We were finding that we had to try to look for individual tickets and maybe people were closing tickets when they finish their part, but it didn't give us the whole picture. We've really been able to get out the metrics of a full service experience. That's been our prime focus over the last year.

I like to call what we are establishing is our operating model. I call it our ecosystem and so we really worked with the CA architects to design what that should look like, how it would integrate with other existing software and tools. We built a picture so everyone can understand this is what we're building, just like a real architect plan would be, and it let us have a road map for a few years and go to our state and get money to actually implement something.

I think the stability of the solution is pretty good. We've not had any major issues. I think that it's been stable and consistent and pretty quick response times.

Scalability I think has done a reasonable job for us. We're at the beginning of setting up, we've about 15 workflows and we want to get to 30 or 40. It's not been that challenging for us to make that happen. What we've learned is that the tool can do what we want but you have to make the business process changes and to establish the workflows. Get in the process to finding people to work in the new way has been the real challenge.

We do have access the architecture team specifically and do need to talk to the technical support staff. They've been able to help us through anything that we have challenges with from little problems to bigger issues. What we've really seen is the architect help at the beginning has really helped make our solutions better even before we implement them.

I think that we did use some other vendors to help us implement some of the solution, and some of those groups were not as strong as we might have wanted, but I think everything from CA's perspective has been pretty strong. The one element that we've wanted to see improved and we've really worked with them on is the user interface is what I like to call a little conky and so we are consistently working with them and the product marketing people to make it better.

Mostly it was a financial forecast, looking at how much it was costing us to do that. Also we're working in Colorado to setup our own cloud serves and maybe that we offer to the counties and to other state or other cities inside Colorado. It was just time to put that into our data center and a little bit more in our control, but really it was a cost scenario where it saved us money to convert those licences and better idea for 2 or 3 years and then we can look at where we could be in the future. Maybe the cloud providers were not as advanced we might have wanted at the time.

I think we were a year, year and a half into our big implementation of that whole ecosystem. I think initially we probably had some bumps and it was a little bit slow based on we were in the cloud, and migrated back into our data center so that we could see growth and speed and improvements there.

We really looked for the capabilities of integrating with other systems. There were a lot of interfaces already defined, easy ways to leverage, we had VMware, internal setting infrastructure team already, time keeping systems. We probably had 2 or 3 of their products already, so it was easier to add the others rather than completely change it all together, even though we're completely open to the future looking at what is possible. Right now it makes sense for us to work within the existing suite. In the state government funding models, we have to plan 18 months in advance. You're never really current if that makes sense, so we look for mature tools rather than bleeding end solutions, because we can't take the risk.

I think we were certainly looking at ServiceNow as a possibility, and they would be a good provider and can meet a lot of our potential solutions. We couldn't replace things that we already had with CA, so it was an easier transition to use what we had.

I think it's a 7 or 8/10 given that it certainly does what we needed to do, but I don't know if it's anything spectacular. It seems like it integrates things rather than really operates in more new and modern ways that I think the current population wants. Maybe that's a perfect fit for the state employees or a mixture of that, but I think that we would want to see continual improvement and really think differently in a way that mobility needs to operate.

I think I would really look at the business process first and then what are you willing to do and what are you willing to change. There are a lot of solutions that are possible. I think the CA suite really does work well, but you have to work at it. You have to be willing to bend to any solution's workflows, and so I think you just have to look for the one that's the best fit for your willingness to change.

The Service Catalog integration for service delivery is a feature that we find very useful and we're getting great benefit from it.

User satisfaction has improved dramatically for our customers. It's really improved a lot since bringing in Service Desk. This has, therefore, improved things internally for us.

We would like to have a unified self-service tool for all the tools that Service Desk Manager integrates with. This would really improve the product.

We've had no issues with deployment whatsoever.

It’s very strong with stability, no doubt. Because of its stability, we are able to improve our user experience -- and that’s invaluable.

It's scaled just fine for us.

The technical support at CA is good at times, but it works very slowly. They are also at times not responsive, which is not good.

Set up was very, very easy, and we were happy with this. There was no problem at all on this front.

Make the most of the documentation, this is essential and would be my only advice for this product.

First, make user experience your focus. Second, get Service Configuration for this.

The most valuable features for me are the scalability of it, its ability to bring in everyone at one time, and all the data-related functionalities. It works with products that were not easy to pull in, whether it be the CIs or contact data. So that's really been helpful when we've had to make a lot of bulk changes, bulk uploads, and import/exports of data.

Customizing it is very, very difficult to do. Although I know we're supposed to stay away from the code, we've got a lot of things internally where we can't revamp the processes and we'd rather use the tool than have to create customized things. But when we want to customize something, we can't do it easily and it's not very intuitive.

I'd also like to see a Quick Request function.

It deploys just fine.

It's got a lot of weird, inconsistent behavior.

It's scaled to our needs.

I've used technical support quite often. To rate it, I have to break it down. As far as responsiveness goes, 7/10. Overall knowledgeability of the product, there have been some cases where it's taken three or four weeks for us to get a test fix out. There is no internal support with extraction there; so that one is none. I've had maybe our cases with extraction, and technical support has always had to play the middleman, and then wait until another person is available for assistance. So overall knowledgeability has some work to be done.

Before Service Desk, we were kind of flying a bit blind internally. With it, we're still in the honeymoon phase, but it's provided us many, if not all, of the tools that we're looking to use and implement in our system. And the online community has been excellent as well.

I'd like to see a Quick Request function. I think the reporting has been a little bit lacking as there are some basic dashboards, metrics and reports that we'd like to see that we've struggled to get out of their out-of-the-box system. So I'd say the reporting hasn't been quite as robust as we'd like it to be.

I think many of the good features are outweighed by some of the services and support issues we've had, and so again, we're still in the honeymoon phase, and we've got some struggles that we're trying to resolve. I think we're probably going through some growing pains.

We went live in August, but our implementation lasted longer than the norm, so we had probably almost a two-year implementation.

It's had a lot of weird behavior. It's been stable, but almost a little schizophrenic. A perfect example: We have a solution center that our level-1 analysts are primarily using. If there is a Quick Incident, they perform a Quick Request, but not together, and not consistently one or the other. We've brought this up with CA, saying, "We really need both, because these are people that are putting in 50 and 60 tickets a day, and the steps that they need to go through outside of Quick Request or Incident just take too long. Our metrics are really tanking because of this." And the response was, "Oh, well, you shouldn't have performed Quick Request." "Okay, well, we did, so now we want both." So we've had that discussion with them in development because we've found this inefficiency in the system.

We're not at that stage yet.

The community groups that we've joined have been excellent. We've gotten a lot of information from those.

We came from HP, and it was well past end-of-life to the point where we were pretty much holding our breath on a daily basis as to whether it would stay up all day or not. So we waited, probably, well past the useful life of the HP system, and that's what prompted us to start looking at not only a service desk solution, but we also wanted a more robust solution.

The CA suite has a larger availability of th ose modules that we could work together to get the whole package. We are using monitoring a bit, so we use UIM, and we just went live with SDM. And we, of course, use Service Desk. So the expectation is to implement as much of the suite as we possibly can in a step-wise fashion.

It was not straightforward. We essentially pulled out a legacy system that worked our team to the hilt as we were bringing in not only a new product, we were also bringing in a new process. We were looking at how we could follow a certain methodology, so it was a double whammy for our staff to develop that, so our implementation took a little longer.

We did. We did an analysis that came down to two different vendors, CA and another, and we ended up going with CA for a couple of reasons. We have several people in the organization who had experience with CA. Also, we felt there was less risk because CA was established in the market.

The biggest strength of Service Catalog is that it's integrated with other solutions on the CA platform. They're all designed to work together.

It is, however, pretty generic. It's very similar to other service desk modules I've seen and used in the past such as ServiceNow, Remedy, and others like those.

We're essentially in business services. The role of the business architect that we play is the definition of our services to our customers, the internal capabilities to support those services, the service delivery processes, the design of those processes and automation, the structure of the organization, rules and responsibility, functions, and change management. Service Desk helps us with all of that.

Its biggest weakness is the user interface.

We don't experience a lot of down time. It's so stable.

Recently since we've been doing more automation, there are some scalability issues there, just in terms of volume, transactions, and speed. End users have gotten notices that say, "Script running, do you want to continue?"

The development and support teams handle that.

I wasn't involved in the implementation.

Determine what the impact would have on your organization and how it needs to operate. There's this fundamental change that comes with buying a platform like this. Don't assume that you can just put Service Catalog out there. If you really want to take advantage of the entire suite, there's a significant organizational impact on how you manage, your job descriptions, all of it. It's recognizing what it is up front before you make a purchase.