ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence, located in Doha, the capital of the state of Qatar, has invested in Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM for its Corporate Services support desk. The service desk provides a customer focused and streamlined support service for finance, administration and IT to ASPIRE's 480 staff and students. The IT Team selected Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM for its compatibility with ITIL best practice, combined with the benefits to be gained from consolidating support for diverse business functions on the same help desk software platform. 30 IT staff now use Supportworks ITSM to log and track service requests using Incident, Problem and Change management processes, enabling them to monitor and report on all aspects of service provision to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Supportworks ITSM's automated workflow processes have reduced the need for manual tracking and enabled IT and the other service teams to deal with enquiries efficiently, resulting in improved service to users. The web self service function enables users to log service requests and submit queries, which are then automatically sent through to the relevant service team.

Ahmed Sharifai, Senior IT Services Officer at ASPIRE said; "As an organisation we want to operate on a world class level and so it was important that our background services can support our business objectives. Hornbill’s customer service software has helped us to achieve our goal to create a corporate service desk that provides a single point of contact for all staff and student support services.

"We chose Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM tech support software as it combines the business and technology focus that we required. As existing users of Supportworks helpdesk software prior to adopting ITIL, it was also a straightforward upgrade path for us. Now by automating processes and monitoring and tracking requests, we have been able to improve our service delivery while also operating more efficiently. Both our customers and the business now benefit from a streamlined more cost effective service," said Sharifai.

Supportworks ITSM is linked to the organisation's asset management system, enabling the team to relate incidents and change programmes directly to assets and services. Each service function can measure its performance against the agreed business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), enabling each department manager to analyse the results, identify trends and escalate problems if required.

ASPIRE is also using the knowledgebase within Supportworks ITSM to build and share information as well as populating its own configuration management database (CMDB) for use by the IT team.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems said; "ASPIRE Academy has managed fast growth in a short time, to become a player on a world class level. Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM is a service management tool that can support the people, processes and technology infrastructure that such an organisation needs to operate efficiently, across all support functions. It provides the tools to enable teams to adopt ITIL best practice and automate processes, maximising resource to fulfil service requirements."

- ends-

About ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence
ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence is located in Doha, the capital of the state of Qatar, in the heart of the Arabian Gulf. The founder of ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence is HH Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al- Thani, - his wish is to create a world-class institution of educational sport.

ASPIRE's long term development philosophy is to create a generation of outstanding sportsmen and their sports culture. Top European clubs youth academies are invited to Doha by the academy to play friendly games against ASPIRE football student athletes. ASPIRE student-athletes travel all over the world for winter and summer training camps that include competition in the world’s most respected junior programs.

Currently there are approximately 200 student-athletes from grades 7 through 12 who study and specialize in many sports such as football, athletics, squash, table tennis, sailing, judo, gymnastics, swimming, tennis, fencing, rowing, shooting and golf. The Academy also sponsors local and international community programs.

For more information please visit:
www.aspire.qa