Technicolor is a name instantly recognisable to any movie fan. The company pioneered one of the most successful methods of colour film processing, and now operates from 58 sites worldwide supplying services for creative industries such as films, home entertainment, gaming and broadcasting.

For the past three years, Technicolor has operated a central helpdesk infrastructure to improve the quality of IT support, using IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice tools and IT business management (ITBM) software from vendor Touchpaper. The installation has been such a success, the firm now plans to roll it out to offices in Europe and Asia in early 2009.

The ITBM suite covers three main areas ­ – IT service management, customer service and support, and network and system management.

Technicolor’s IT manager, Glenda Bruner, said the department has become more efficient as a result of the centralised helpdesk, responding to operational problems from the firm’s 6,000 users faster.

“Previously, we were not managing incidents well and there was a lack of visibility into problems at high level,” said Bruner. “It was difficult to track all the incidents across our 58 sites.”

One example was the reporting of phone outages.

“Each site used to log its own problems with its own tracking tools. When we upgraded the system, we saw that 40 per cent of the sites were going through the same problem,” said Bruner.

The project implementation lasted from May to October 2006.

“Although the implementation took a while, it was based on our schedule and there was only a week where we were actually installing the tool,” said Bruner.

The ITBM suite went live two weeks prior to the business centralising the helpdesk. In that time, the IT department had tested the tool and introduced new processes.

“We had a team of 13 people working on the beta testing. They were already trained on ITIL so they knew what they needed to achieve with the new tools and processes,” said Bruner.

“As we built a lot of processes around the new helpdesk and tools, we began to feel we were in more control of the business’ support service and could deal with customer queries more effectively.”

Technicolor built a knowledge base of known problems and tied historical information and procedures into the change process. Information was made available to everyone so that individual technicians can benefit from collective experience.

“When a technician tries one change process and it fails to fix the problem, we need to document the failed change and why it failed, as well as the ultimate solution,” said Bruner.

Key performance indicators are now issued to management from the IT department on a monthly basis, covering areas such as the number of calls resolved within a certain period and resolution rates.

Take-up of the ITIL standard has surged in businesses in the past four years, and staff with these skills will become increasingly valuable, according to trade body the Service Desk Institute (SDI).

Service levels on ITIL helpdesks saw the number of calls resolved at the first attempt rise from 21 per cent to 60 per cent between 2004 and 2008, according to SDI research.