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3 Reasons to Ditch Your ITSM Solution for a No-Code One

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 18:15:32 Z

With an increased shift to hybrid and remote work environments, IT teams have had to adapt their support models to meet the evolving needs of their organization at a rapid pace.

For most IT organizations, the programming effort required to customize less flexible software solutions to meet the changing demands of the business can often be expensive and slow-moving.

In contrast, a no-code solution allows you to configure your IT solution without requiring developers to write code, giving your IT department the freedom to customize to meet unfolding needs.

This not only saves budget expenses that can be reinvested to other initiatives, but no-code architecture also gives your IT department more time for project development and innovation.

Implementing an ITSM solution with no-code architecture means that from initial setup and configuration to continued maintenance, modifications, integrations and enhancements – no knowledge of a programming language is required.

The benefits of no-code ITSM

There are far more advantages to a no-code solution for an organization’s IT department. All you need to get started is simple, foundational knowledge of no-code ITSM. 

1. More autonomy and faster time to value

The refrain from IT leaders is consistent and clear: being beholden to developers is an impediment, not an advantage. 

The demands for your IT department, which services your entire organization, are only growing. You not only have to maintain the systems used by employees but are being asked to provide tech for multiple departments, including facilities and HR. This is amongst fluctuating business models, organizational arrangements and more.

Expectations are high, but timelines and budgets are tight.

IT departments have learned to adapt to these constraints and have adopted a DIY spirit with help from no-code ITSM solutions. No-code architecture gives your IT department the freedom to come up with easy solutions on your own with quick implementation – without the need for developers.

2. Lower labor costs and broader candidate pool

Pre-pandemic, recruiting for an engineer with a skill set in a specific programming language narrowed the applicant field and increased salary requirements.

Recruiting for specialized skills was already difficult, especially for organizations with offices far from the coasts or major cities. Along with the Great Resignation, this has become an even more inconvenient truth.

In contrast, the market for staff who can execute utilizing a no-code ITSM solution is far wider and more budget-friendly. This means hiring to support your ITSM program is easier, and so is handling turnover among staff.

3. Gain time for strategy and innovation

Delivering services and support is at the core of any IT department’s mandate, but what if you could automate and customize work flows so that the majority of their time was spent being proactive instead of reactive?

With a no-code approach, you save time and money, which can be an invaluable reinvestment for your IT team. This allows you to focus on more innovative projects that allow you to meet or exceed team goals, drive innovation across the organization and meet the overall goals of the business.

By offering value that goes beyond what you are expected to deliver, your team becomes indispensable to every department in your organization.

Find new freedom with no-code architecture

It can seem like a smart, sophisticated choice to build your ITSM solution on a specific programming language. However, this decision locks you into a propriety solution, limits your team’s ability to innovate, minimizes your candidate pool and hampers your ability to truly showcase the value your IT department has to offer.

No-code technology might be exactly what you need – it allows you to rapidly develop low-cost, specialized solutions that support not only your team and the services they deliver, but also the broader mission of your organization.

Curious? Continue reading to learn more about no-code ITSM.

Ivanti Named a Leader in the Omdia Universe 2022-2023 Enterprise Service Management Report

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 18:54:10 Z

We’re delighted to share that Ivanti has been named a leader in the Omdia Universe Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Report for 2022-2023. Omdia’s annual report aims to evaluate high-quality ESM solutions available in the market to support both IT and business leaders in selecting the right ESM platform that best meets their needs and long-term goals.

There are eight key capabilities, attributes and features that Omdia's report considered when evaluating the 7 best-in-class vendors:

IT infrastructure and service
IT operations management
Security operations
IT business management
Deployment and integrations
Business workflows
Digital employee experience
Reporting and analytics

Based on the rating, Ivanti is positioned as one of just 3 leaders. Self-healing and low/no code capabilities are just a couple recognized in the report:

“Ivanti delivers a diverse and richly integrated set of capabilities that support more hybrid and mobile-centric ways of working…Ivanti’s combination of strong service management, security, and endpoint management capabilities make it a solution worth shortlisting by enterprises looking to deliver against digital workplace initiatives.”

According to a survey conducted by Omdia, 24% of the enterprise workforce is permanently hybrid (a mix of in-office and remote-based working), whilst 20% is permanently remote. The fabric of work is changing, which makes an ESM solution critical to support business resilience and productivity. Meeting the needs of a distributed workforce requires daily workflows to be better integrated, mobilized, automated and operationalized in a scalable way, all of which ESM solutions enable.

Additionally, they allow to put more focus on employee experience and business needs. In fact, according to Omdia’s survey, the top three areas enterprises plan to invest in for their organization are

1) tools to help measure and improve employee experience,

2) tools and services that improve how devices and applications are managed and secured,

3) improving technical support capabilities.

“Ivanti’s proposition continues to evolve in interesting ways, especially in how it supports businesses embarking on future of work initiatives… Just over a year since its acquisition of both MobileIron and Cherwell, Ivanti has made excellent progress in strengthening its overall portfolio and in positioning itself as a vendor that supports businesses on the path to the Future of Work.”

Ivanti has invested in strengthening our platform over the past few years through driving strategic acquisitions. This allowed for our roadmap differentiation and continued diversification of capabilities that support the future of work, as well as the employee experience. Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, the center of our ESM offering, modernizes service delivery for IT and beyond by offering full flexibility to deploy in the cloud, on-premises or a hybrid combination, supporting whatever model enterprises need. This allows organizations to automate workflows and eliminate costly manual processes, all while increasing efficiency, compliance, and security. Moreover, it assists IT teams in being proactive and preserving employee productivity by empowering service teams to nip issues in the bud, all behind the scenes via self-healing.

We’re grateful to Omdia for recognizing our team’s efforts to enable the future of work. You can view a copy of the Omdia Universe report here and a press release about this announcement here. To learn more about Ivanti’s ESM solutions click here.

You’ve Achieved GDPR Compliance—Now What?

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:11:37 Z

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Most of us remember the months and weeks leading up to the deadline. We did whatever needed to be done to achieve compliance.

Now it seems like a distant memory. And the pressure is mostly off. But in other ways, it was just the beginning. As you continue creating your day-to-day compliance strategy, you might find that the tactics that got you to the finish line were more short-term solutions that won’t necessarily stand long-term.

“Companies are resorting to temporary controls and manual processes to ensure compliance until they implement more permanent IT solutions… Much work remains to be done after the May deadline if businesses are to overcome challenges like these and develop solutions that are sustainable in the long term.”

—McKinsey & Company

To ensure you can sustain GDPR compliance for the long haul, you may need to dig deeper into four key areas: compliance framework, incident management, request management, and executive visibility.

Compliance Framework

Compliance for your organization might look like most others’: pieced together manual solutions and workarounds, like spreadsheets. But continuing to use inefficient and ad hoc governance and management methods can put you at great undue risk.

Companies can be fined up to 4% of their annual global revenue or €20 million, whichever is higher, if they fail to comply with GDPR standards.

Given the potentially devastating fines associated with non-compliance, spreadsheets simply aren’t a sustainable solution. You need a simple way to map GDPR articles—like those detailing consent (7), data access (15, 16, 17, 20), protection (25), and security (32)—to company controls to ensure you have your bases covered.

Request Management

While it has many layers, GDPR is ultimately about personal data control. Providing your data subjects with access to the data you store about them and giving them control over how that data is used (Articles 15-20) are the bedrocks of the regulation.

“…companies will need to ensure they have enough staff, adequate training, an appropriate process, and a ticket system equipped to handle related requests.” —McKinsey & Company

Because it’s also the most consumer-facing piece of the compliance puzzle, your ability to enable and manage access to personal data is critical. While the guidance around how you do this may be fuzzy, the rules of engagement are straightforward. Those who deliver the best customer experience through a simple self-service portal will win. And those who don’t risk losing customers to more able competitors.

Executive Visibility

GDPR requirements around data protection impact assessments (DPIAs)—like those detailed in Articles 35, 37, 38, and 39—can’t be sustained by cutting corners. If you’re relying on disparate and/or manual systems for aspects of GDPR, you’ll also be challenged by the regular data audits, reviews, and data management exercises needed to maintain compliance.

You need to provide executive management and your data protection officer (DPO), if applicable, a unified view of compliance governance and management. Beyond compliance, your visibility into the numbers and types of requests and incidents you’re managing is key to performing ongoing risk assessments and gap analysis, so you can streamline and refine your compliance posture.

As an IT pro, you’re no stranger to the challenge of data privacy and protection. But GDPR adds a whole new layer to your security governance and risk management requirements. More than ever, you need your service desk and security procedures to be tightly coupled.

Ivanti Neurons for Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) integrates a set of enterprise security management capabilities that address the demands of both security and service desk leaders. When you rely on the Ivanti Neurons for GRC for your data governance and management, you can:

Simplify mapping of GDPR articles to your security controls.
Streamline your security compliance, easing the burden of your next audit.
Accelerate security event and incident handling to aid your compliance.
Extend self-service portal capabilities to provide data subject access.
Automate risk assessments to better anticipate and mitigate risk.

You’ve achieved GDPR compliance. Now, it’s time to make it sustainable.

Want to learn more? Join us on December 2^nd to hear from leading GRC experts on how you can manage risk proactively to minimize chances of security breaches, attacks and data theft.

Reserve Your Spot

McKinsey & Company quotes sourced from: Daniel Mikkelsen, Henning Soller Malin, Strandell-Jansson, Marie Wahlers, “GDPR compliance after May 2018: A continuing challenge,” McKinsey & Company, April 2018.

Facility Management Software: Everything You Need to Know

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 19:32:50 Z

In today's increasingly complex work environment, facility managers play an ever-growing role in ensuring that organizations have access to the tools and services that they need to function at their best, especially when it comes to the return to the office. If you've met or spoken to the facility manager at your organization, you may have noticed they're one of the hardest people to get a hold of. The truth is that facility managers’ plates are always overflowing—whether it's coordinating cleaning and maintenance for the building, implementing socially distanced workspaces, or managing meeting room bookings—a facility manager spends their day making sure there’s business continuity.

Facility management software is one of the best ways these skilled professionals can automate daily processes, manage workspace, facilitate communications, equipment tracking, payments, budget and other pertinent information. Continue reading to learn more about the discipline of facility management and how the latest software is helping facility managers drive the efficiency and productivity across the organization.

What Is Facility Management?

Facility management is a multidisciplinary profession whose goal is to enhance and optimize the functionality of built environments through the integration of people, places, processes and technology. The International Facility Management Association (IFMA), the world's most widely recognized professional association for facility managers, defines it as "the practice of coordinating the physical workplace with the people and work of the organization."

Facility management has also been defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO), who released the most recently updated version of its international standard for facilities management in April 2017. ISO 41011:2017 defines facility management as "organizational function which integrates people, place and process within the built environment with the purpose of improving the quality of life of people and the productivity of the core business."

In a 62-country job task analysis conducted by IFMA to determine the core competencies associated with the facility management profession, 11 core competencies were consistently reported in the survey as being crucial to the daily performance of facility management tasks, including:

Communication
Emergency Preparedness and Business Continuity
Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability
Finance and Business
Human Factors
Leadership and Strategy
Operations and Maintenance
Project Management
Quality
Real Estate and Property Management
Technology

The IFMA was able to use the results of this landmark study to establish educational and examination materials that accurately reflect the interdisciplinary skills and knowledge that are most important for effective facility management.

What Do Facility Managers Do?

Effective facility managers have numerous responsibilities that they must carry out, day in and day out. From a strategic standpoint, facility managers have to be able to effectively communicate with the clients, customers, and users of the buildings that they control, helping them understand the impact of different decisions on the allocation of space and services in the facility, as well as cost and risk. From an operational standpoint, facility managers are responsible for the ongoing maintenance of a safe corporate atmosphere that allows building occupants to function effectively in their roles.

Here are some examples of activities that would fall under the scope of facility management:

Supporting the Return to Work

Completely remote, in-office or hybrid, whatever the working model, facility managers must be able to support the accommodations of all employees to ensure business continuity.

According to building security company, Kastle Systems, only about 32% of workers are back in large office buildings. But staffing firm LaSalle Network confirms via a survey of 350 businesses that 70% of employers plan to have employees back in the office in some capacity by the fall.

To support this transition, facility managers are going to need the right tools to do so. Making sure they have the ability to schedule sanitation, support PPE supply requests, open and close access to various sites, buildings and floors, and more will be critical for a successful and seamless return to work.

Gartner® predicts “adoption rates for three of the applications (seat reservation systems, space utilization tracking, and workplace applications) are expected to grow between 146% and 250% between January 2021 and the end of 2022.” Gartner also predicts “Building management applications, portfolio management technologies, room scheduling systems, and lease management technologies had the highest rates of adoption at the start of 2021, with adoption rates anticipated to reach as high as 90% by the end of 2022.” ¹

Getting these technologies in place sooner than later can help facilities managers make sure business continues, no matter the working model.

General Upkeep & Maintenance of the Building

Facility managers are responsible for coordinating tasks associated with building maintenance, including:

Contracting a cleaning service to wash carpets and mop floors during building off-hours
Contracting cleaners to clean bathrooms during building off-hours
Ensuring that consumables available in the building (toilet paper, paper towel, facial tissue, etc.) are in-stock and replaced throughout the facility in a timely fashion
Ensuring that the procedures and contractors are in place to effect waste removal and disposal from the facility in accordance with the local waste pick-up schedule and legal requirements
If the facility offers catering or a cafeteria, ensuring that a contract is in place for catering to be provided
Managing reactive response to any issues associated with building maintenance, such as a broken or malfunctioning air conditioner or furnace that affects work in the facility

Managing Building Access & Security

Facility managers are responsible for regulating access to the facility, including the restriction of admittance to the facility to authorized personnel. This could include:

Contracting a security service to regulate entry to the facility
Instituting and maintaining a system of regulating access (keys, electronic cards, RFID chips, or other), and administering the system such that only authorized persons can gain access to the facility
Allocating parking spaces in and around the facility to manage the availability of parking and ensure that certain persons that must be present at the facility have access to parking when needed.

Space Allocation & Changes

Organizations and offices may change layouts frequently, especially if organizations will be adopting socially distanced workspaces. An office building could house many different tenants, and the facility manager would be responsible for coordinating new tenants moving in or tenants moving out of the building. Facility managers also bear responsibility for maintaining aspects of building condition that could change as office configurations change, such as:

Ensuring that workers have an adequate amount of space, or that there is adequate space per staff member reflected in the floor plan for a particular building or office
Ensuring that the layout for the building is in keeping with fire safety regulations
Ensuring that signage posted is appropriate for directing residents, employees, and guests in the facility to the appropriate resources, such as fire exits or elevators
Maintaining control of temperatures in the building, including ensuring that office spaces are sufficiently comfortable for the organizations that occupy them, and that infrastructure like server rooms are kept at the appropriate temperature
Ensuring ventilation systems are functioning adequately and that the indoor air quality does not represent a safety hazard for building residents or employees

Equipment Maintenance

Facility managers may also be responsible for managing IT resources and equipment in the building. If a photocopier, computer, or other piece of equipment must be repaired or replaced, the facility managers would be responsible for replacing the item in a timely fashion to avoid business interruptions.

In addition to managing all of the above-mentioned aspects of the facility (plus more), facility managers are also responsible for managing the contracts for each service that the building needs, managing invoices and receipts, handling budgets, and ensuring that contractors are adequately paid and that service continues in a way that prevents business disruptions.

A facility manager could also be responsible for bringing in contractors for critical repairs if the building is damaged by a flood or a storm, and ensuring that businesses housed in a facility have a business continuity plan in place, in the event that a major business disruption occurs and the residents of the facility must move to another building.

What Are the Best Practices for Facilities Management?

To ensure the maximization of productivity across the organization, facility managers can consult and adopt industry-leading methodologies. Here are some of the current best facility management best practices:

Effective Space Management

Space utilization is one of the core concerns of a facility management, and effective space management within a facility can help an organization save money on real estate, minimize walking steps, optimize productivity, earn more revenue, reduce utility bills, and improve employee retention—that's a lot of benefits for just a small part of a facility manager's role.

To optimize space, facility managers need to start thinking outside the box. Instead of measuring rooms in square-feet, measure them in cubic feet looking for opportunities to stack things and maximize the space. Count the number of workstations—not the number of rooms. Facility managers need to understand square-feet per person and the impact it has on productivity, and project head counts at facilities into the future to plan accordingly. Getting a grasp on space utilization will be especially helpful when it comes to the return to work and maximizing space effectively – and safely.

Follow ISO 41011:2018

In 2018, the International Standards Organization published a document called ISO 41001:2018 that details global standards and best practices for facility management systems. The document discusses leadership, planning, support, operations, performance evaluations, and the need for continuous improvement in facility management systems. Organizations that need to demonstrate effective and efficient delivery of facility management services that meet the demands of the customer should adopt this standard, and all facility management professionals should at least be acquainted with it.

Prioritize Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is another best practice whose benefits are almost too many to number. Organizations that strategically schedule and carry out preventive maintenance benefit by avoiding the large and unexpected costs of things going wrong, along with improving employee retention and job satisfaction, and avoiding business interruptions.

Preventive and routine is so important that cutting janitorial staff from five days a week to just three days a week was considered to be one of the budget cuts that would cause the most problems in a facility. An emerging best practice is the use of facility management software to schedule, manage, and track routine maintenance costs and their budgeting impacts.

Streamline Customer Communications

Some facility managers are still using email and phone calls to facilitate communication with customers, but this practice is quickly being replaced with facility management software that provides a single platform for communication between facility managers and the demand organization.

Facility management software helps automate simple to relatively complex facility management tasks so that customers can serve themselves, maintains proper records of conversations between facility management staff and customers, and ensures business continuity in case of staff turnover. It also ensures transparency and accountability throughout Incident Management and can help track metrics to facilitate improvement in customer service. This not only supports improvement of facility operations, but also provides for a much better employee experience.

What Are the Benefits of Facility Management Software?

The most effective facility managers are using specialized facility management software to help them stay organized, automate recurring tasks, and streamline many of the routine processes that are associated with managing a building. Facility managers have a lot of responsibilities, and the ability to manage them on a centralized dashboard that creates a "single source of truth" allows for more transparency between the facility manager and other stakeholders, along with service delivery that's more reliable and simply better. Here are some of the key features of facility management software:

User Portals That Facilitate Communication Between Facility Managers & Building Tenants

Effective facility managers need to establish and maintain open lines of communication with various customers and stakeholders. Facility management software offers a user portal feature that lets members of an organization communicate with the facility manager directly. In the past, someone might search for the facility manager's email in the company directory and send a query to their inbox. Queries were not tracked and sometimes overlooked or lost.

User portals streamline communications, providing a common platform where users can initiate work orders and communicate effectively with the facility manager, who can now see all their pending work orders and requests in one convenient dashboard.

This functionality is especially useful for managing building access—users can request key cards, security clearances, parking, special after-hours access, and other services that can be managed and automated through the software.

Project Management That Manages Resources

Project management is a feature of facility management software that enables users to visually and intuitively organize projects that involve multiple stakeholders. Facility managers can define and track the deliverables for the project, manage communication between project stakeholders, allocate responsibilities, manage meeting minutes, and track budgets for the project.

In the past, facility managers would have to track project data using pen and paper—notes that could easily be lost or damaged. A software solution for project management is the best way to ensure that budgeting and expense records related to building management projects are being sufficiently tracked.

Space Management Tools That Optimize Floor Plans and Save Space

Facility management software can be used to provide real-time information about how space is being used in the facility, including the number of personnel using the space, what business assets are present in the work environment, and how the space is arranged. This high-level overview of the way a building functions can be used to optimize processes—the facility manager can propose space management solutions that make the best use of the space available and optimize workflows for various functions in the building.

Growing organizations may believe that they need to relocate for more space, but an effective facility manager might be able to optimize the space to help avoid leasing or purchasing additional facilities. The best solutions integrate with Building Information Management (BIM) software, allowing users to view floor plans in 3D.

Asset Management That Ensures Optimal Allocation of Resources

Asset management forms a significant portion of the job role of any facility manager. Organizational assets must be tracked and accounted for, and facility managers need to know where they're located, what departments are using them, what departments need them and how frequently they are used. Facility managers are also responsible for scheduling maintenance and repairs of equipment and for planning the replacement of outdated assets, requiring them to project capital expenses into the future.

Facility management software provides a convenient dashboard from which the facility manager can monitor the repair and usage status of any equipment the organization owns, ensuring that equipment can be allocated wherever needed throughout the organization.

How Can I Get Started with Facility Management Software?

If your organization is still tracking important asset data, work orders, and requests using email and spreadsheets, it could be time to upgrade to a facility management software that can streamline your processes, introduce automation for routine tasks and improve your organizational efficiency.

Facility management software can also play a role in business continuity planning. Maintaining a single dashboard for all things related to facility management ensures that if your current facility manager leaves the company, the next person can pick up where they left off thanks to complete records of projects and organized work orders. When you track assets and work orders in spreadsheet and email, it can be difficult or impossible for your company to sort out what needs to be done after a personnel change.

Want to modernize your approach to facilities service management? Request a Live Demo

Facility Management Software is a Must for Modern Organizations

Facility management software is the best way to maximize the impact of facility managers at your organization. User portals facilitate direct communication between facility managers and other members of your organization, ensuring that work orders and requests can be completed in a timely fashion that keeps your business moving. You'll also be able to easily automate recurring tasks like cleaning and maintenance, manage physical assets with greater accuracy and keep secure records of payments, invoices and budgeting. Not only is this critical for overall optimization of operations, but essential for a smoother return to the workplace.

Find out how Ivanti is transforming facility management with Ivanti Neurons for Facilities. Learn more

¹ Gartner, 11 Space Management Technologies to Watch in 2021 and 2022, Tammy Shoham, 10 May 2021
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Apply Service Management Beyond IT? No-Brainer.

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 12:00:00 Z

IT Has Been Heads Down...But It’s Time to Look Up

It’s no secret that the past year and a half has been challenging for all departments across organizations. One unsung hero? IT.

IT is quite literally responsible for keeping the lights on in a work environment that has shifted primarily online. That’s no small feat and encompasses many functional services like emergency response, asset management of laptops and other equipment loans, responding to an exponential increase in service desk tickets, fortifying the security of sensitive information in the shift to remote work, enabling other departments in delivering services remotely, etc.

And that’s on top of continuing to drive priorities like digital transformation and addressing the complexity that comes with an increasing number of endpoints from things like personal devices, networks and self-service devices. That’s also while the business demands for IT projects continue to rise, particularly around the development and deployment of applications for which they’re accountable for the quality of the employee experience and governance. Plus, we can’t forget they’re also being asked to justify the value of capital and OpEx investments to prove IT is in alignment with strategic business objectives.

It’s Clear: IT Maturity is the Way Out

IT has been going above and beyond the call of duty to maintain business continuity – and some. There have been long nights, lost weekends and high pressure as teams have done and are still doing more than they could have ever anticipated to keep pace with the changing technology environment. All of this said, things have come to a head and this breakneck pace isn’t sustainable…at least not without more maturity.

But the truth is that IT service management (ITSM) maturity at most organizations has been stalled for years. The average maturity of an IT organization’s service management processes is actually ~5 on a 10-point scale. There are unused chatbots and knowledge bases, out-of-date service catalogs, inaccurate CMDBs, limited automation, inconsistent problem management, etc. More sophisticated processes have been traded for budget and time to put out other fires. It’s been quite the vicious cycle.

If there’s one thing that has changed, it’s been the path to maturity, which has evolved quite a bit over the past few years. Achieving maturity is no longer about looking inwards to try and implement every ITIL process and best practice under the sun but looking outwards instead. Adopting service management across every line of business from HR and Facilities to Legal and Project Management is how you do it. Enable these teams to manage service, with IT at the center to guide them in avoiding their same pitfalls.

The risks of IT not taking a leading role in governing and guiding the business as digital transformation continues to accelerate, as complexity increases and as the demand for better employee experience rises are plentiful. They include issues like diminished employee experience, productivity and efficiency, and an increase in Shadow IT, lack of IT engagement, more disparate systems, diverted budget, and a lack of IT relevance in line of business service management.

Extending service management to other parts of the business is how IT teams can mature. And it’s how they can scale without having to add excessive headcount.

Shift from Reactive to Proactive Strategy

By applying service management practices to other departments across the organization and by enabling them to deliver service to employees in a modern, unified way has many benefits.

Improved Employee Experience

Employees want to be able to find answers to their questions and want quick resolutions to their problems, whether they’re working in-office or remotely. Not knowing who to go to for what and where, as well as the status of their requests can create a very frustrating service experience.

By extending service management across other lines of business, you can provide employees a one-stop shop self-service portal that they can utilize for all their needs. Knowledge Bases help employees find answers, Service Catalogs help them understand what they can get help for, and automated status notifications can assure them each step of the way.

With a unified service delivery strategy, employees can find what they need quickly and get back to doing what they do best, saving frustration and time.

All-Round Increased Productivity & Efficiency

When the majority of workflows can be automated and handled without human intervention, that’s a win-win for everyone. Automatically, requests are routed to the right teams, status notifications are sent, and requests are resolved.

Applying service management across other departments helps employees get back to work faster and frees up the time of those delivering to work on more pertinent employee needs and strategic projects. Plus, with a unified service management strategy, progress can be tracked, handoffs are clean and process breakdowns can be identified. Cross-team collaboration becomes that much easier.

More Visibility of KPIs

A disparate and fragmented approach to service delivery makes it difficult to see issues and improve upon them. But imagine if you could gain visibility into problem-areas, not only in IT but across other lines of business!

A unified approach to service management allows organizations to be more strategic in general. Not only can high priority issues finally be clearly identified and fast-tracked, but bottlenecks can also be easily uncovered to support continuous process improvement.

Via various reporting and analytics dashboards, you can drill-down to the KPIs that matter most team-by-team, but also to executives. Resources and energy can be shifted to where it matters most to keep the organization moving forward.

IT Becomes an Even More Valued Business Partner

With IT at the center and driving all this effective change across the organization, it’s also going to affect the entire company’s ability to deliver results. And this kind of excellence will be hard to ignore.

Enabling whole departments and individual employees to do their jobs better means IT understands the organization’s strategic objectives and can effectively help implement them. IT will be viewed as a trusted business partner and can be relied upon as a leader when it comes to other strategic initiatives, especially regarding modernization and digital transformation. This strategic organizational role will only continue to grow as opportunities where IT deliver value and drive success are uncovered (hint: they’re pretty endless).

Enter Ivanti, the Solution

Ivanti Neurons for HR and Ivanti Neurons for Facilities are purpose-built solutions to help you extend service management across your organization. These solutions are integrated with the Ivanti Neurons platform and Ivanti Neurons for ITSM—so you can use the tools already in place to help your company’s HR and Facilities teams make the move to advanced service delivery.

This article originally ran on HR.com.

HR Service Delivery: What Modernizing Can Do For Your Organization

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 20:25:59 Z

When it comes to running a Human Resources (HR) department successfully, it’s a balancing act of maximizing budget and productivity. HR is a core part of the enterprise, but it is often up against flat or shrinking budgets. A lot of time gets invested into searching for ways to eliminate full-time employee hours spent on tedious manual tasks and re-shift its staff’s focus to driving more strategic initiatives. But due to its broad range of responsibilities, HR practitioners often struggle to provide a single, seamless solution for employee engagement. This typically leads to one or both of these negative consequences:

HR managers are overburdened with an avalanche of employee requests.
Employees are unhappy with their HR experience and frustrated with slow response times.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Modernizing HR service management (HRSM) can help you avoid both of these pitfalls, and with a huge plus to boot: A streamlined approach not only allows HR staff to focus on more strategic tasks — it improves the employee experience and reaps benefits across the entire organization.

Here are some of the advantages of transforming your HRSM.

The Employee Experience Is Drastically Improved

In today’s digital workplace, employees have similar expectations to consumers, which means they expect HR to deliver services on demand and in real time. Many of today’s business leaders have recognized this and are making shifts in their digital efforts to focus on optimizing the employee experience. Deloitte highlights this emerging trend.

“Organizations are no longer assessed based only on traditional metrics such as financial performance, or even the quality of their products or services. Rather, organizations today are increasingly judged on the basis of their relationships with their workers, their customers, and their communities, as well as their impact on society at large—transforming them from business enterprises into social enterprises.”

Business leaders recognize that modernizing their HRSM is a great place to start. And HR practitioners understand that employees should be able to self-serve, especially when it comes to topics like payroll and time off. Employees want to be able to search and find these answers for themselves, in one place, and at any time. Here's the good news: a modernized HRSM solution with an employee self-service portal can make this possible.

Today’s HRSM tools can dramatically improve the employee experience in many ways, including helping employees feel taken care of when they can get ~75-80 percent of their HR needs through an HR self-service portal. Modern solutions provide a unified interface for accessing important HR-related information and resources.

Employees Get the Customized, Personalized HR Interaction They Expect

New HRSM solutions can deliver a much more personalized employee experience. Via the HR knowledge base, you can provide customized content based on employee attributes—that way, they only see the targeted information relevant to their specific role, status, position and geography.

In many ways, these new HRSM tools behave a lot like consumer websites—they capture data to understand online buying behavior, adding personalization and customized display results based on consumer preferences.

HR Wins Big with New HRSM Tools, Too

Above all else, the most important focus on HRSM is to optimize the employee experience to improve employee satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity.

HR can benefit from HRSM solutions in many ways, including:

Increased HR productivity: Self-service, a foundational aspect to a well-equipped HRSM solution, can help drastically reduce the volume of repetitive employee requests by 75 percent . This frees you up to focus on resolving the remaining 25 percent of requests, as well as work on more strategic projects.
More efficiency: Modern HRSM solutions enable you to streamline and automate even the most complex cross-departmental workflows. You can eliminate manual processes like phone and email communication by automatically routing service requests to the appropriate fulfillers like security, facilities and IT. This removes bottlenecks and improves service delivery and efficiency.
Better analytics and reporting: Today’s HRSM tools are also pre-built with on-demand analytics that provide meaningful operational data and help drive accountability. Measure and monitor KPI’s such as time-to-resolution—which is essential for understanding the impact and success of your HRSM solution. Drastically reduce the time to fulfill requests, even as the number of requests steadily increase in volume. And access individual records so you can drill-down to details whenever you need.

Thinking about modernizing your HR service delivery strategy? Stay tuned for more details on Ivanti Neurons for HR, launching next month. Your organization will be able to streamline and automate your HR service delivery, from onboarding to case management. Company-wide efficiency can grow exponentially, and your self-service portal delivers the modern HR experience that employees expect.