The issues

Le Figaro Group is a leading player in the media market. Based in the centre of Paris, it employs over 1,800 staff, practically all of whom have a workstation. Within the group, user support - calls, incidents, requests, problems and changes stemming from the information system infrastructure -is handled by several different departments. There is a special department for the editorial teams, one for the IT infrastructure and another one for everything to do with telephony and administrative services. "These units do not all use the same helpdesk tools or the same operating procedures, so it is sometimes difficult to resolve incidents when it requires collaboration. Each incident is handled separately, without any history for a particular user or item of equipment. Moreover, we don't have a common data repository that lists all the infrastructures in the IT asset base," explains Cécilia Caignet, Studies Project Manager (Aubay consultant) in Le Figaro's IT Department.

To make the IT resources more available for the group's employees and facilitate the work of the support services, the IT Department was looking for a comprehensive solution capable of providing operational and technical management of the entire asset base. "Our aim is to standardise all of our processes and facilitate communication between the teams. We also want to acquire a new multi-platform inventory solution, because our asset base contains not only PCs but also Macs and servers," adds Cécilia Caignet.

The choice of PS'Soft

In spring 2009, the IT Department drew up specifications, consulted various industry experts, including CXP, and issued a call for proposals. A number of vendors were short-listed. "We assessed them all, using very detailed scenarios that included end-to-end incident management. In the end, we opted for the PS'Soft IT Asset Management solution, because we were very impressed by the product demonstration and the software's overall usability. The product also offered all the functionalities we were looking for - it handled incidents, problems and change requests - and was closely integrated with the repository used to manage assets and configurations. It offered a full-web interface using a dedicated portal and, as we had requested, included an agentless multi-platform inventory capability and integration with the CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) already in place in the company," says Cécilia Caignet. Another factor that influenced the group's choice was the relatively short implementation lead times

Project delivery

A PS'Soft project manager was asked to implement the application and a specialised consultant carried out the inventory. "We installed the solution in August 2009. The first step was to collect and integrate the inventory data. It is a relatively long task that took us a month and a half." Next the IT Department set up its new asset management solution. "We developed a large number of automatic controls and synchronised the application with the Active Directory to gain a deeper knowledge of the working environment of each user: the hardware and applications he uses, where his desk is situated, etc. This will save the helpdesk a lot of time, because all the information we need to assist users will come up directly on our screen." Ticket management, on the other hand, is still in the test phase. The solution as a whole should be operational by mid-December.

The results

The group's IT Department wants to use its new tool to provide consistent management of the life cycle of all of its assets, along with the associated processes. This will give it an exhaustive, accurate, long-term vision of its IT assets. It will have unified management of IT services and support for all of its users. "The helpdesk is currently drawing up a "to-do list" of all the tickets to be dealt with, the pending loan requests, the machines to be prepared, etc. to facilitate the work of the support services by providing a single list of all the tasks to be done. The PS'Soft tool will also improve the way we manage problems and help us eliminate recurrent incidents", says Cécilia Caignet. The availability of numerous dashboards should also help the IT Department better identify the various services provided by its teams (how many incidents handled, how many pending tickets, etc.), better adapt to user expectations and, in the final analysis, improve quality of service. "The portal will give our users a single entry point to the IT Department. It will be available in self-service mode, so that employees can directly post a service request (fix a failure, lend hardware, etc.) and track its processing."