As new innovations in technology are made to meet the evolving needs of consumers and businesses alike, 2024 is set to be a major year for ITSM. For this reason it is imperative for organizations looking to remain competitive in the digital age take advantage of ITSM benefits. This is all the more important as businesses continue to look for ways to incorporate technology in all aspects of their organization; such as sales, HR, marketing, communications and operations.
As such, IT teams are no longer isolated from the rest of the organization’s activities. Rather, they play an integral role in driving change across the organization. This is where ITSM’s benefits for enterprise service management comes into play
How does a business suffer if it doesn’t employ ITSM?
Ignoring the benefits of ITSM can create a range of problems for a business. These include inefficiency, lost revenue, vulnerability to security risks and lack of innovation. In short, ignoring ITSM renders businesses incapable of keeping pace with their more tech savvy competitors. A detailed overview of these problems is given below:
1. Increased costs
The lack of ITSM results in an organization’s precious resources being squandered. The problem usually starts from not being able to properly monitor data and leads to using redundant hardware or overstaffing. Not using ITSM can also lead to more dramatic anomalies such as unplanned IT incidents, leading to a surge in unexpected costs.
2. Decreased productivity
Lack of proper ITSM utilization can increase resolution time for tickets. This makes addressing a range of issues – such as service requests, IT incidents and evolving customer needs – tedious and time consuming due to improper prioritization and lack of automation. Lack of access to ITSM tool kits also slows down tasks and workflows related to delivery of quality IT services, causing decreased productivity and reduced customer satisfaction.
3. Compliance issues
Most industries have their own set of rules and regulations regarding IT security and data protection. Ensuring your business is meeting these criteria is a key ITSM feature. Ignoring ITSM can therefore lead to non-compliance issues, causing legal troubles and added costs in the form of fines and reputational damage.
4. Decreased visibility and control
Without ITSM, it is harder for an organization to monitor its IT investments and ensure they are performing optimally. Poorly optimized ITSM makes it harder to monitor key metrics such as uptime, response time and availability to find the areas of improvement.
5. Security vulnerabilities
IT security management is a critical ITSM tool feature that gives an organization the proper procedures, processes and controls needed to effectively manage and counter security risks. Lack of a proper ITSM policy makes your business vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches, data theft, and similar threats.
In short, lack of ITSM or its improper utilization results in reduced efficiency, increased costs and puts your business at a disadvantage against the competition
What ITSM benefits can your organization take advantage of?
Modern business organizations rely on a growing number of IT services. These could include data storage, database management, and software support among other services. Without ITSM tools, managing all these facilities can become tedious and take up a lot of human resources. According to an AXELOS survey, 60% of organizations reporting “great” ITSM success also said their digital transformation efforts were also positive. ITSM can help businesses achieve the following advantages:
1. Efficient ticket resolution
Service management operations can be made much more efficient through IT ticketing software. This is an essential part of the ITSM toolkit. It streamlines, enhances and organizes requests related to services, incidents and problems. This is possible because ITSM helps track and prioritize tickets related to any kind of issue. This feature also ensures effective communication between IT support teams and end-users. This greatly enhances productivity while also bringing up customer satisfaction.
2. Improved communication and collaboration
ITSM benefits include tool features that make internal communication processes more efficient. Clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of the IT team and relevant stakeholders, establishing consistent service delivery processes, documenting and sharing information and establishing feedback mechanisms can reduce needless confusion and conflicts. ITSM can also drive smoother collaboration by centralizing communication through ticketing systems, automated status updates on tickets and maintaining a shared knowledge base for quick access to information.
3. Get better value out of investments
Businesses are increasingly dependent on IT to measure the value of their technology investments. This is done through improved data collecting and reporting. For example, ITSM reporting can help businesses track the value they are deriving from their hardware investments. If an organization is investing in laptops by Brand-A and Brand-B. ITSM reporting will be able to tell the organization which brand is giving it the most value in terms of fewer repair needs and longer device life. The organization can then make its next investment into the brand that gave it more value, thereby increasing the value it’s getting out of future investments.
4. Effective change management
Change management refers to the IT practice of minimizing disruptions while applying any update to systems or infrastructure. It is one of the core ITSM capabilities that can give an organization frameworks to better manage change processes. This includes the collection, documentation and analysis of relevant information to better guide the change process and incorporating testing of changes to avoid needless disruption.
5. Knowledgeable decision making
Proper utilization of ITSM capabilities can give a business well-defined frameworks that help it make value driven decisions. This is accomplished through reporting tools that give detailed information about the organization’s IT assets and the value the organization is able to derive from its investments in them. This includes data about various IT assets and softwares, where these assets are being used and by whom, as well as the amount of reservations they are getting. These data insights help guide organizations towards the most effective decisions. This enhanced transparency can bring about both financial and administrative efficiency.
6. Reduced mean time to repair
ITSM practices can give a business the holistic incident response strategy needed to deliver swift resolutions to any disruptive incidents. The aim is to restore all services while minimizing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The core practices that would make up such a response strategy would include using the ITSM tool features related to intelligent incident detection and triage, integrating systems for timely alerts, effectively communicating and collaborating in real time, proactive maintenance, and embracing continuous improvement to the overall incident management strategy.
Employing these approaches give an IT team the ability to execute agile issue discovery with rapid incident response. When such an approach is used, incidents are found and resolved prior to a damaging escalation. In short, ITSM allows for proactive intervention rather than reactive troubleshooting, significantly cutting down MTTR.
7. Improved user experience
ITSM benefits include the efficient delivery of services in accordance with an organization’s business needs. This is immensely helpful to both employees and customers as it entails giving them access to features like a knowledge base, user-friendly interfaces, monitoring tools, mobile accessibility and quick issue resolution. These features allow employees to resolve their own issues without assistance from a dedicated helpdesk agent. A study by Deloitte states that by 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce. This means that very soon, businesses’ employees and customers will both come from a generation that has been raised with technology. As such, they are likely to expect a greater degree of flexibility, accessibility and reliability in the tools they use at work or pay a business to provide.
8. Compliance protocol adherence
ITSM software helps you adhere to practices and policies that are directly related to making an organization comply with software license vendors. These include inventory management, license tracking, automated compliance checks, software usage policies and installations guidelines. Compliance risks can be mitigated further through periodic audits. These can be further supplemented by rigorous documentation, providing another layer of protection against compliance violations through transparency and accountability. It is also important for the organization to create a culture of compliance, which can be done through employee training programs.
9. Enhanced visibility
One of the primary ITSM benefits is the improved monitoring of IT assets. Surveillance of assets’ performance, health and availability is an advantage because it helps the IT teams’ capacity to resolve unplanned incidents, while also enabling them to collect data through the three stages of reaction; identification, diagnosis and response. This helps the team predict and prepare for similar incidents going forward.
10. Access to service catalog
Employees’ capacities for self-service can be greatly enhanced through a service catalog. A well-designed catalog will facilitate continual improvement efforts by centralizing management of requests. This allows traceability of operations from the application to delivery phase, and documents all the intermediate steps. The recorded information can then be used to enhance user self-service capabilities, improving customer satisfaction and reducing management costs.
In short, successful businesses need ITSM for effective management of IT services regardless of company size or the industry it operates in. It is especially important for the smooth end-to-end delivery of IT services, which have become increasingly important as the business landscape becomes increasingly digitized.
Frequently asked questions
What are the main objectives of ITSM?
ITSM is mainly focused on improving the quality and speed of service delivery while maximizing customer satisfaction. Many businesses mainly use ITSM to manage and support their IT systems, while others also utilize it to broker and manage a range of processes and services across the enterprise.
What are the effects of ITSM?
A well-executed ITSM policy should result in enhanced transparency, improved service quality and better customer orientation. These lead to better IT function productivity, responsiveness and customer satisfaction.
Who uses ITSM tools?
ITSM tools facilitate the tasks and workflows related to management and delivery of quality IT services. They are mostly used by IT services desks and IT service delivery functions.
