In the modern business environment, organizations and companies of all sizes are growing more dependent on their on-site IT solutions. The purpose of these is to deliver essential functions and services for their business.
With IT functions becoming more embedded in daily business operations, more businesses choose IT service management (ITSM).
For business owners who are unsure if IT service management solutions are a smart investment, keep reading. Here are some of the key ways these services can benefit any business.
- Improved Efficiency
Efficiency refers to getting the most out of the available resources. IT service management offers multiple components to help businesses and organizations maximize resources.
IT asset management is one component. This is a set of processes used for optimizing IT assets’ life cycle management. The goal is to find the most affordable strategies.
These are then used for asset disposition and procurement.
However, efficiency benefits don’t stop there. The solutions offered are customized to the business’s needs to ensure ongoing growth and further success.
- Improved Customer Experience and Better Service
For many businesses, the customers they serve rely on a strong, problem-free infrastructure during all interactions. With IT services management, there are several ways to improve customer experience and service delivery.
The service strategy process makes it necessary for IT organizations to align activities with business needs. This means the IT organization works on the business’s services, ultimately creating a better customer experience.
Another aspect is formalized incident response and ticketing systems. Incident management improves service by ensuring the IT organization responds to all incident reports or service requests submitted.
- Improve Self-Service Productivity
Organizations use ITSM best practices to improve overall levels of self-service productivity. Self-service solutions are now considered a preferred alternative to more traditional help and service models. The goal is to ensure tech-savvy users resolve incidents or take care of service needs without IT operators’ input.
The result of this is increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs related to ticket resolution. It is possible to read more here about the growing prevalence of self-service and self-sufficiency.
- Improve Effectiveness
What do you use for measuring your organization’s effectiveness? It is up to you to determine the key performance indicators you measure. These are what you use to measure overall team performance.
It is also necessary to track KPIs over time to figure out if your business improves its overall effectiveness across these metrics.
Organizations and businesses that utilize ITSM processes and structures can benefit from more formal systems that work to drive importance as time passes, as long as they are executed effectively. Adopting and implementing a structured incident response will help reduce your total response time.
It will also reduce the amount of time it takes to achieve a resolution. Focusing on crisis and disaster management will help reduce your MTTR – mean time to recover – if a service interruption occurs. ITSM provides the framework to help you increase the effectiveness of all aspects of your IT service delivery. This is done by way of continual service improvement.
- Improve Accountability in Business Functions
Business functions refer to the activities carried out by an organization. They can be split into core functions, which are the activities that yield income. There are also support functions, which help to support and streamline the core functions.
IT is considered an essential support function for most businesses. This is especially the case when the organization has adopted ITSM to help align activities with the business.
IT service management includes the implementation of processes to monitor activity on the IT infrastructure and organization’s network. It also helps to detect any breaches of company-wide security policies.
- Use Standardization to Improve Accountability
Standardization of services can help improve accountability. It is one of the defining features of IT service management and one that helps IT organizations improve overall compliance using IT procedures and policies to deliver services.
One of the main functionalities of ITSM is standardizing service delivery in the business by implementing functions, such as the IT service desk. It also helps with formal documented processes to deliver every IT service type.
IT managers can track operators’ actions with IT service management software and how service requests or incidents are addressed. The features offer a higher level of visibility into the way that IT organizations deliver services.
With this in place, IT managers can review all incident records to verify services are being delivered consistently. This is necessary to ensure compliance with all procedures and policies.
- Risk-Free Integration of IT Changes
Changes must be properly planned, tested, and then communicated to the business. If this doesn’t happen, there is a risk that new changes could cause service interruption.
With ITSM, a process is put in place that helps ensure the IT organization can implement new changes to the IT environment that work to remove or limit the risk of damaging a business because of change.
Formalized policies, processes, and roles work together to support and create a change management process that provides clear communication for customers. It also helps to ensure change is approved through the appropriate channel based on the potential impact.
It can also be used for identifying any possible issues with changes that occur during the design stage. All this occurs before being manifested during deployment.
What to Know About IT Service Management
When it comes to IT service management, there are several benefits offered. The key is to implement and use the services that best suit the business’s needs in question.
The key elements of a successful IT service management solution are mentioned above and provide a guide to ensure the right steps are taken.
When it comes to business and improving efficiencies, be sure to check out some of our other blogs. Our team is dedicated to providing useful business information that helps you grow and achieve more success than ever before.
