The Information Technology department is crucial to the long-term success of any company. It manages the risk, increases resiliency, and anticipates (and solves) issues to protect the organization. The department also controls the cost of software, hardware, and cloud solutions.
IT Service Management, or ITSM, is how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. The service includes all the processes and activities to create, design, support, and deliver IT services. Fundamentally, ITSM is meant to be given as a service. It allows organizations to realize their goals and enhance competitiveness in the dynamic world.
This article unpacks the five ways in which ITSM can boost your business.
1. Streamlines Operations Through Standardization
One of the primary reasons why you need to opt for IT service management services is to streamline business workflows by standardizing tools and services. Standardizing tools, processes, and policies across the business makes it easier for different units to collaborate and communicate. The company will save labor and time on its operations and enhance its agility.
For instance, a business implements a standardized change form for all its central departments. The move allows all the departments to conform to new requirements for showing impacts and risks more quickly. IT service management also assists in eliminating unnecessary changes, allowing employees to be more agile and aligned with the company’s processes to enhance the business’s profits steadily.
2. Enhances Effectiveness
It may take time to measure the overall effectiveness of an IT organization. Yet, if you are a manager, it is up to you to choose the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) that will apply in measuring your team’s performance. You will also have to track the performance indicators over time to know whether your company is improving its effectiveness across the metrics.
Organizations that adopt IT service management processes and structures benefit from formalized systems that push improvement when executed effectively. When you adopt a structured incident response, you lower your average response time and mean time to resolution. On the other hand, focusing on crisis management will reduce your mean time to recover (MTTR) whenever there is a service interruption.
IT service management offers a framework for enhancing the effectiveness of any of your IT service delivery aspects through continuous service improvement.
3. Enhances Visibility into Performance
ITSM introduces formalized rules and processes that IT organizations can utilize to optimize and standardize their service delivery. It advances process maturity within the organization with the Capability Maturity Model Integration scale. As your organization matures its processes, it gets increased visibility into performance as indicated below:
- Level 1: This is the initial level. It is unpredictable and poorly controlled, and you cannot measure performance adequately due to inconsistency.
- Level 2: This is the managed level. Here, the process is characterized for some projects but is usually reactive. There is a lack of standardization.
- Level 3: This is the defined level. IT service management helps organizations to define their processes clearly.
- Level 4: This is the measured stage. After a process has been standardized, IT service management software is used to capture data from it and measure its performance. This ability to capture the data creates proper visibility into performance, helping businesses move to the last level.
- Level 5: This is the optimization level. The organization leverages performance visibility into insights that push performance improvement over time.
4. Improves Scalability
One of the challenges faced by many businesses is scalability. The ability to garner resources to meet demand or lower consumption to control costs is the key to remaining competitive while eliminating impacts on service delivery. Cloud-based solutions are usually beneficial for enhancing scalability since it allows businesses to add or remove IT resources as required.
It is worth noting that it takes more than a cloud solution to create true scalability. Also, it is crucial for an organization to have scalable procedures and processes to leverage its IT assets in the most efficient ways possible.
5. Achieve a Better Return on Investment
Some organizations invest in IT service management only to find it does little to improve the performance of the IT organizations. These businesses often leave their ITSM tool to determine the ROI.
Adopting and implementing ITSM goes beyond purchasing a software tool. IT service management should include adopting processes that reflect best practices for managing essential IT functions and services. The next step is creating procedures and policies to ensure the processes are followed. If your business has already invested in ITSM solutions, you can improve your ROI by focusing on people and processes that support your IT service management initiatives.
Wrapping Up
Information Technology Service Management provides countless advantages that continue to add value as technology is added and matures. The above are just a few advantages you can derive from IT service management.
ITSM will take your business from functional to exceptional. You will have improved operational efficiencies, increased staff productivity, lower risks, and better customer satisfaction.
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