Get Your ITSM up and Running on All Cylinders

Your ITSM organization may have everything needed to run at full speed and address a wide-range of problems, but a few missed steps could render all that preparation useless, leaving you crawling at a fraction of the pace.

To get started, you must understand what will make a difference to your business. The greater your understanding, the swifter and more preemptive your responses and actions will be to support the required agility to reconfigure your platform, fine-tune and automate processes, and measure business impact.

Understand your business and the users you serve

Know industry and compliance regulations. Understand who the ultimate customer of your business is (not IT), how the organization is solving its challenges, and how IT could help do it more effectively.

This isn’t necessarily the wholesale creation of a new market but potentially the recombination of services and technology in a different workflow—such as what Uber did with its transportation model.

As you understand your business more clearly, you’ll begin to better comprehend the changing needs of your users, how they prefer to communicate with your team, or when there are busy and quiet periods in the working year.

Understanding the seasonality of an industry helps avoid the risks, incidents, and instability due to changes. You’ll create stronger relationships as you offer the tools and services users need to do their job more productively.

Offer exceptional experiences to your business users

As you cement your relationships with your business users and learn the services they require, you can gain a more coherent view of how your users want to access services and support. This will help you craft the optimal experience to match your business users’ expectations.

Like any enterprise that creates a service or product for the consumer world, you can have the most compelling offering, but it will fail if it isn’t distributed correctly through the right channels, if it can’t be easily accessed, or if users don’t know it’s available. Adopt the same operating principles when creating your multi-channel interaction experiences to make your users their most productive.

Adopting automation

This will help you speed up all of your responses while optimizing your cost management. You’ll be able to shift resources to react faster to changes in your enterprise’s operating environment. Enterprise agility is pervasive. Every department, not just IT, must be involved for the business to be more agile.

Through stronger relationships, better user understanding, and collaboration with other departments, you’ll be positioned to offer consultative advice to HR teams, facilities teams, sales and marketing teams, and others.

You won’t just advise on needed services, but also on how they can optimize their workflows through automation. Instead of being the tail end of an activity faced with supporting a Shadow IT service that increases pressure and reduces your ability to support business agility, you can craft and automate the workflows with other departments and suggest new services as you go.

Understand business value creation and demonstrate how you support it

Through better relationships, you’ll begin to understand the objectives and priorities of different business managers within the organization. Your effectiveness at tying IT performance, measurement, and reporting to business outcomes will improve. You’ll add value by revealing insights that better support, enable, and impact the enterprise.

Enterprise agility requires a single, consolidated view that anyone can access easily to spot trends, highlight areas to drive improvement, and communicate them so the enterprise can take action ahead of its competitors.