IT service management is the craft of implementing, managing, and delivering IT services to meet the needs of an organization. It ensures that the appropriate mix of people, processes, and technology are in place to provide value.
When we talk about ITSM and its benefits for business, there are few basic questions that pop up like How does a business run? For whom? For what purpose? With what tools? to which the answer comes by dissecting areas of concern.
When we break down ITSM , there are five areas that come up :-
- End Users: Employees and customers who use IT services
- Services: Applications, hardware, infrastructure, etc. provided by IT
- Quality: Solving IT problems effectively and efficiently
- Cost: Getting the most out of an IT budget
- Business: Enabling a company to perform its core functions and achieve its goals
Taking into consideration there are various ways in which TSM benefits IT and business, few of them are mentioned below:-
- Improved efficiency and reduced operational costs
Optimized processes, workflow, automation, and alerting can remove unnecessary manual effort and rework. This is added to when self-service and self-help capabilities are used by employees.
- Self-service efficiencies and workload reductions
Employees can get to the solutions they need more quickly through self-help. Then this and the ability for employees to log issues and requests via self-service means fewer telephone calls to the service desk or the business function equivalent. The automated delivery of solutions & requests further adds to the potential labor savings and reduces stress on your service desk agents.
- Using a fit-for-purpose
ITSM solution for enterprise service management can help to ensure that all employee issues and requests are dealt with and, where possible, to agreed service levels. No more losing requests in personal email accounts or delays through the inefficiency of individuals.
- Increased control and governance
Enterprise service management processes and enabling technology can be used to implement much needed internal controls and to provide insight into who did what when as well as higher-level reporting.
- Better service and customer experience
Enterprise service management ups the corporate service provider game to better deliver against employee expectations across ease-of-use, self- service, service request catalogs, knowledge availability, and self-help, social or collaborative capabilities, anytime and anyplace access (to services and information), and people or customer- centric support.
- Standardization
This is not only business-wide, optimized processes but also a common way of working, a common look and feel, and a common service model for employees. It also offers the potential to provide a single point of service, no matter the service provider, companywide.
- Improved collaboration within and across business functions
Not only does enterprise service management make it easy for work to be passed between individuals or groups, or to be worked on collectively, it also makes it easier for work to pass between different business functions.
So when we analyze the whole relation between ITSM and business / organization, it is always a two way process. Not only is enterprise service management an opportunity for other business functions to benefit from ITSM principles and capabilities, it’s also an opportunity for IT to further demonstrate its business worth through its wealth of service management skills, knowledge, and experience and the provision of the technology to support business-wide service management. They both go hand in hand.
