IBM Control Desk is an integrated service management solution that helps you manage a comprehensive range of IT processes, services, and assets. The product leverages best-practice Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-aligned processes to help you manage an IT landscape that is becoming more complex, virtualized, distributed, social, and diverse. As part of IBM’s Smarter Infrastructure initiative, IBM Control Desk helps you to optimize the performance of your infrastructure and workforce, in alignment with your overall business objectives. You get the control to maintain configuration integrity in response to planned changes and unplanned incidents and problems occurring across this complex IT landscape, ensuring continuity of service, speed of response, and efficiency of management. The product features innovative, industry-leading functionality in many areas, including:

  • A simple, easy-to-use service catalog and self service interface
  • Tools for easily reporting problems and requesting services
  • Applications that enable IT staff to be productive and responsive in prioritizing, tracking, and resolving end-user issues
  • ITIL-aligned change, configuration, release, incident, problem, and asset management
  • Policy-based automation of job plans, task assignments, notifications, and workflows to reduce labor costs
  • Integrated service, asset, and configuration management
  • Built-in integrations with IBM and third-party applications
  • Advanced reports and analytics tools that provide insight into your environment and help you manage change more efficiently

The product enables you to perform basic system configurations, rather than coding, to quickly adapt the product user interface, data model, and workflows to your particular environment and business needs. Rapid Environment Setup (REST) application programming interfaces enable you to easily integrate with internal applications.

IBM Control Desk offers improved visibility of your infrastructure; increased control of resources, processes, and changes; and automation to reduce costs and improve the consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness of crucial processes.

IBM Control Desk stores a wealth of data about services – incidents, problems, service requests, assets, CIs, and more. Integrations based on Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) enable you to link to data stored in other sources, acting as a consolidator and organizer rather than storing additional copies of data. You can use out-of-the-box reports or create your own reports to use stored and linked data to identify error-prone processes and infrastructure. This enables you to create a Service Improvement Plan or Service Quality Plan. For example, you can view trending reports on Incidents on CIs to identify which applications or systems are most in need of upgrades. and what upgrades you can make to improve a service. Similarly, report data gives the administrator a way to monitor and enforce service quality by viewing SLA compliance across owner groups or vendors. You can also compose a report that shows the month-to-month costs of services to assist with the management of a rolling plan.

In addition to the information provided here, you can find more introductory information about this product in the planning documentation, which describes the required middleware and deployment options for your product installation.

Product editions
This product is provided in multiple editions to match the needs of a wide variety of customers. Customers can assign employees to tasks without having to worry about the impact to product licensing; users have access to all of the features and capabilities provided by their edition.

Deployment options
To meet the needs of a wide community of customers, IBM Control Desk can be deployed as an enterprise solution or through the web-based cloud infrastructure that is administered by IBM.

Product components
IBM Control Desk includes a range of components that contribute to your ability to manage your IT environment effectively and efficiently. The components that you have access to depends on the product edition that you are using.

Configuration Management Database
The configuration management database (CMDB) is a database that stores information about configurations items (CIs) for use in change, release, incident, service request, problem, and configuration management processes. The CMDB is a key element of ITIL-based service management. The CMDB might be part of a larger Content Management System (CMS).

Product functions
IBM® Control Desk provides many functions that help you manage your information technology environment.

Multiple-customer capabilities
If you are using IBM Control Desk for Service Providers, the product provides a range of applications and features that enable you to manage the data centers of multiple customers. You can fulfill customer change requests, manage customer configuration items (CIs) and assets, perform audits, manage service desks and service catalogs, and more. You provide, and bill for, these services according to defined customer agreements. Data is strictly segmented by customer, ensuring that only authorized customers and internal users can view information about each customer.

Control Desk mobile app
Using the Control Desk mobile app, agents and managers can perform several Control Desk functions directly from a mobile device.

What’s new in IBM Control Desk
The latest version of IBM Control Desk includes numerous updates and enhancements. The subsequent fix packs associated with the latest version provide additional enhancements.

Accessibility features for IBM Control Desk
Accessibility features for Control Desk assist users who have disabilities, such as restricted mobility or limited vision, to use information technology content successfully.