Hey CIOs, You're Being Judged by Your IT Strategy

Information technology is playing an increasing role into how corporations and industry analysts measure the success of their executive leadership team.

According to a study by the Society for Information Management, 35.5 percent of the performance metric chief information officers are evaluated by is related to how IT contributes to their business strategy. IT user and customer satisfaction is a close second at 31.9 percent, and the value of IT to the business factored in at 29.6 percent.

The face of IT, and at the heart of IT, is the IT service management (ITSM) operation. Therefore, the reality is that CIO performance indicators will be and should be directly influenced and contributed to by the performance of and the company’s perceptions of your ITSM group including:

• How well the group supports business strategies through the introduction of services relevant to new business initiatives and the continuous, efficient management of service delivery.
• The levels of satisfaction as a result of the end-user experiences and interactions you offer.
• The effective coordination of resource availability and fast restoration should a failure occur.
• The ability to work closely with other business departments and IT teams sharing process best practices contributing to asset and security management.

Do these things well as your enterprise grows and responds to market changes and competitive pressure, and your ITSM operation will remain relevant and valuable to the business.

One of the most significant market changes driving C-Level strategies in many enterprises is the rapid advancement of digital business. In a January 2016 press release from Gartner, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, said that leading CEOs report their digital revenues will increase by more than 80 percent by 2020.

Many organizations are already implementing a digital business strategy to harness this growth. This will directly impact your ITSM operation. In this rapidly changing environment, how well does your ITSM operation enable the business to meet this challenge? Are you offering the new digital services and support experiences users want and need to be more productive? Do your processes lead to fast, responsive action? Do you have the insight to offer creative and innovative digital solutions?

Modern business challenges, like digital leadership, demand a modern approach to ITSM to ensure the right mix of optimized user experiences, business value creation, and strategic support to underpin your organization’s digital transformation journey. Modernizing service management requires a comprehensive, user-centered approach to service management. In most cases it’s a long-term commitment to improvement and optimization.