Overview

Request Management is the process discipline of managing any request from enabling its initial submission, providing appropriate authorization, and orchestrating and measuring its fulfilment.

Although the wide adoption of the ITIL service management framework has provided a valuable benchmark and standard vocabulary for organizing service support disciplines, it and various enabling technologies have been “inwardly focused” on how IT supports the business, and aimed mostly at IT users. The recent ITIL V3 update provides a welcomed shift in emphasis, with service management being viewed from the perspective of business needs rather than the infrastructure IT supports. As a result, ITIL V3 now distinguishes Request Management as a process in its own right, as a means to achieve improved business alignment.

Request Management (RM) helps IT service providers professionalize their interactions with internal customers. It provides a unified “online shopping” experience for requesting authorized combinations of goods and services offered by multiple sources of supply, not just the internal IT organisation. It provides the business user with an intuitive self-service, single-point of contact interface to not only make these requests, but also retain visibility of the end-to-end process, from submittal, authorization, through fulfilment. For the business, it minimizes cost and latency of service provision by orchestrating fulfilment tasks that often span multiple systems and/or parties. It also provides the performance metrics which can help drive.

Key Features

Appropriate approval workflow

The Biomni request approval capability constructs a workflow routing on request submission to ensure that every request is appropriately authorised and recorded as such. Support for parallel and serial workflows along with individual and group approval stages ensures requests are signed off in the most efficient and timely manner. Requests can be made available for further editing and to force the capture of additional data required for fulfilment.

Fulfiment orchestration across multiple parties and systems

The Biomni solution provides a highly flexible workflow engine to orchestrate the fulfilment of requests in the most efficient manner possible. Libraries of best practice can be configured before being enabled for a particular business unit / request type combination. It can cater seamlessly for multi-sourcing, passing tasks to external service providers as required, allowing for greater service provision flexibility and reduced impact when suppliers change.

Embedded measurement & pro-active alerting

The Biomni SLA engine enables the flexible measurement of the request fulfillment process and provides pro-active alerting if stages overrun or are about to breach customer SLAs. SLAs can be configured to span multiple fulfillment parties and systems thereby providing a complete view spanning the performance of the entire fulfillment chain.

Integration Capabilities to Support Connectivity to Fulfilment Systems

Biomni provides task templates to integrate rapidly with other fulfilment systems such as Service Desks. Interfaces to IT Asset Management (ITAM) and Software Asset Management (SAM) functions to improve fulfilment automation e.g. in the delivery of software.