Field service has been part of IT since Samuel Morse arguably invented electronics with the telegraph, creating products and services that required well-trained technicians to fix them.

Yet until recently field service IT reps have been de facto on their own, without the full connectivity into the issues, trouble tickets and service agreements that are accessible to their more stationary “help desk” colleagues. While many organizations have adopted ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) processes--and have trained and certified their support reps on ITIL methods--the critical information enabled by ITIL has had to be awkwardly transmitted by voice or text.

As more employees become dispersed, working from home or from satellite locations, field work is becoming less sending out the help desk reps in the vans and more having mobile-only teams both on-staff and outsourced. There is then the need to permit ITIL-trained-and-certified reps to go mobile and remote.

LiveTime Software, which provides SaaS a.k.a. cloud-based ITIL 3 Service Management (ITSM) and service desk software, has come out with a solution: a native iPhone (News - Alert) client on the iTunes App Store. Supporting the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPod touch running IOS 4.2 or later, it provides mobile to both the SaaS and on-premise solutions provided by LiveTime Software, including Novell (News - Alert) Service Desk. The iPhone client requires LiveTime Service Manager or Novell Service Desk 6.2 or later.

The LiveTime iPhone client has been developed natively using LiveTime’s rich web services infrastructure. The native interface has the benefit of delivering the user experience iPhone users expect from their mobile devices. With the LiveTime iPhone client, organizations can manage all service requests, incidents, problems, changes, and deployments remotely. It enables users to communicate directly with customers and monitor SLA achievement and CMDB changes from the iPhone.

Key features include:

--Service metrics dashboard
--Geolocation mapping of customers
--GPS tracking of field technicians
--Customer direct dial
--Request filters and history
--Adding notes and time to requests
--Request, incident, problem, change and release management
--Knowledge management
--Configuration management

“LiveTime has been able to transform organizations’ customer service into agile, knowledge-based service delivery using ITIL v3 best practices, “says the firm. “By removing the complex customization and training normally associated with ITIL solutions, customers are able to implement LiveTime within a matter of weeks not months.”

To take advantage of this mobile functionality requires field techs as well as those behind the desks to become fully trained and certified on ITIL and ITSM processes. The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance provides just that with a comprehensive array of ITIL courses offered via both classroom in a wide range of venues and times and virtually. This flexibility permits field and help desk reps alike to choose the classes that best fit their needs and schedules.