Hornbill Systems (stand 220) will be introducing the latest version of Supportworks, unveiling its ‘human touch’ user interfaces with the updated customer-focused ITSM solution, plus offering a technology preview of its Version 8.0, available later in 2007.

With the new Version 7.3, Supportworks ESP (Enterprise Service Platform)’s proven solutions for employee, external customer and other service-oriented department support now have improved customer self-service, administrative and analyst interfaces providing unrivalled ease of interaction and management of service provision. Workflow business process management has also been given a boost by improvements to the drag and drop based Visual Process Management Engine as well as many improvements to the standard business workflow capabilities.

In addition, Hornbill is forging its own customer service revolution with the ‘human touch’, demonstrated in the latest generation of its ITIL based Service Management application, Supportworks ITSM and its brand new Customer Portal. Redefining ‘Self-Service’ to put the customer firmly in the driving seat of IT Service Management, this new Portal offers a unique human perspective on ITIL initiatives, seamlessly translating business users’ service requests into technology specific workflow, while remaining entirely relevant to each party.

The new ITSM self-service portal has been completely re-designed with the customer experience in mind, providing a fully service-focused application which is intuitive for customers to use and removes the need for the customer to understand any “ITIL speak”, vastly improving their comprehension of the services provided.

“Service Requests” provide assistance for business users logging service issues, combining the known advantages of self-service in terms of best service resource usage, with customer service catalogues defined in the Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB). Service Request types available to business users of the portal require no technical understanding, nor knowledge of whether their issue is actually logging an incident, problem or request for change. A business user can just select a request such as “New email account” and the ITSM application will process the request according to the ITIL principles and business rules that the organisation defines.

Adding the human factor, support desk analysts will have a detailed profile on each user, including a photo to help the support team to know its customers better, their department and manager, their previous satisfaction rating and the current status of their most important services, such as email, internet or applications.

Supportworks Version 8.0, previewed for Q3 release, takes ‘ease of use’ to a further level in service management software, with a total redesign of its user interface aiming to combine absolute simplicity with total functionality. It also offers a totally new, fully web services based SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) application platform designed specifically for customer service and service management solutions.

Gerry Sweeney, Managing Director of Hornbill said “Sometimes Service Management projects forget who the ultimate customer really is. We’ve bound the human touch into our Supportworks product so that this and future generations of our solutions adopt a “Customer First” approach. Too many IT service solutions expect or assume the ultimate customer understands ‘ITIL speak’ which of course is generally not the case. We at Hornbill are committed to helping our customers service their customers in a way that they will really appreciate.”