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ITSM: Modern automation serving business efficiency

The use of technology is now vital to the effectiveness of a business and its units. This innovation is, therefore, at the heart of the modern enterprise, and other departments must adapt to this technological evolution. However, they still need to talk to each other to align both processes & goals.

It is often a question of narrowing the gap between IT and business units to ensure business value creation. This alignment can be done through internal meetings. Here are some practical tips to help you transform your business processes and make your business group more efficient by using IT and its service management capabilities.

Centralize requests and service management

Centralizing request management has its benefits. Ultimately, IT can unite your organization in its performance, supporting your various departments through various business processes.

To ease up your IT colleagues’ job, make sure that requests from selected departments arrive at the same place, in a service management platform, such as a helpdesk or service desk software.

Although each department has its way of working, centralizing these requests avoids silo management, allowing all your teams to deliver clear and collaborative services (IT and beyond).

Keep things simple

It is already difficult to change habits and certain working methods. It is certainly not easy to convince someone to send a request autonomously when they have always called IT support over the phone.

In this context, make the use of technology easy for your requesters. A self-service portal, where they must send their requests for IT services, must be intuitive, simple and fast. Otherwise, your disinterested users will go through their old channels to try to track their requests.

In addition, technology can also adapt to an organization's process. A phone call can automatically generate a ticket when an employee or customer calls the support department.

Be faster

Another reason why customers would not use available technology for sending IT support or service requests is because resolution time (or response time) is not fast enough.

What is the point of using a portal if these requests are not processed in time? The advantage of using technology is to be more efficient, so if you want to see business processes improved, the benefits of the technology must be clear to the people using it.

One way to see and demonstrate these results is by using tables and performance reports. For example, consider ticket resolution time statistics, user satisfaction statistics or the number of requests processed. This will help you see the effectiveness of your business service management and where you can improve. Keeping your customers informed of the status of their requests is another good practice.

Take the lead and help your users

As we said above, it is difficult to change old habits, but it’s not impossible! Training and coaching can facilitate change and reduce resistance. You can let your interlocutors become familiar with the new technology tool before implementing it. It is also an opportunity to see where friction points are to improve.

IT language can lose people from other domains. Only some people know the ITIL difference between an incident and a problem or how to understand the configuration of an SMTP server. Simply translating these IT concepts into the language used by your interlocutors can be of great help for delivering great services.

Finally, document as much as possible! It can be very frustrating to have a question and not find the answer. This is also the type of situation that takes a lot of time for your support teams. Having this information and making it accessible is crucial to service management.

Make your life easy: Automate as much as possible

Sources of errors will often be be initiated by a human.

Thus, to ensure the quality of your business services, it makes sense to want to automate theses manual/recurrent activities as much as possible. This reduces errors while reducing the resolution time.

Business rules are usually easily configurable, allowing you to automate a process or assign a series of tasks automatically.