Operational efficiency impacts the bottom line of every organization. When employees are faced with IT issues, the most common way to a resolution is to march into the IT office and find help. Most businesses do not have the proper systems in place to make this experience efficient for the employee or the IT department. Legacy solutions only create costly friction that slows the employee experience when the employee should be spending time on high-value business priorities that enable you to gain an edge on your competition.
A modernized ITSM can solution provide a path to meaningful operational impact. Here are three reasons why a modern ITSM solution will improve employee engagement and experiences:
You will start bringing consistency to how you deliver IT service experiences.
Legacy IT often inhibits your organization from being able to deliver consistent service results to both your internal and external customers. Many legacy IT methods and procedures evolved directly from manual, paper-based systems or from managing information in spreadsheets on desktops. While that was a step in the right direction at the time, those workflows and processes were embedded into many organizations before the advent of the new, modern ITSM solutions. Many legacy IT systems don’t adequately leverage the digital environment and the wealth of information in which we now live and work. But just digitizing your existing IT methods and procedures won’t resolve all the issues.
Using traditional workflows designed by humans, it’s almost impossible to achieve greater efficiencies. Speeding up and simplifying processes would be like a game of whack-a-mole. ITSM uses sophisticated computer algorithms to analyze real-life data and then automatically calculate the optimal path forward. ITSM emphasizes capturing and reusing data in ways that eliminate redundancies, lag times, and inconsistent decision-making and improve record-keeping.
Designing and implementing a modern ITSM that is focused on consistent service experiences enables your organization to identify no-value and low-value activities and remove them from your workflows which decreases response times, increases your employees’ productivity, and enhances your customers’ experience.
Your employees will be engaged in shaping your long-term ITSM vision.
You can’t eat an elephant in one meal and you can’t implement a modern ITSM all at once either. You must have a vision. Your vision is the foundational cornerstone of any ITSM implementation. Vision is about defining desired outcomes based on corporate goals and then convincing others to rally around those goals as you put your vision in motion. Identify what’s most important to your organization and develop metrics for your implementation journey that align with the business strategies of your organization.
Breaking down your organization's IT needs to various IT activities, projects, and workflows and prioritizing them in a roadmap is one of the foundational elements of any successful modern ITSM journey. Rank and prioritize projects methodically by scope, scale, and cost to determine their strategic business value to the company. Prioritized rankings lets the entire company get maximum value out of every project and identify the synergies and efficiencies.
Create a detailed roadmap that explains how you’ll achieve your vision. Link each stage of your roadmap to a desired outcome you can measure. Measure progress at each stage of implementation. A roadmap is particularly valuable for measuring ROI because it requires you to pre-define what success looks like. The research firm Forrester recommends that your short term roadmap should prioritize incident management, problem management, and knowledge management. Your long term roadmap priorities should grow to include more business aligned solutions, such as financial, asset, project, and security operations management. Your goal is to build a matrix that spells out how each step of the roadmap aligns with your vision. But remember, it doesn’t all have to happen at the same time!
It is important to constantly roll out new features and capabilities that your employees and customers specifically asked for and/or suggested. With this approach, you’ll keep them excited about the implementation.
Your employees will gain real-time visibility into the status of requests or tasks.
With ITSM, organizations stay focused on centralizing and formalizing workflows and creating user-friendly employee experiences that move your business priorities forward. By aligning employee tasks to strategic business objectives, relying on data and analytics to improve efficiencies, and strengthening collaborations among departments, your company, employees, and customers all reap the benefits of quicker workflows and processes thus saving time and money.
ITSM could end inbox clutter, phone calls, emails, and post-it notes by insisting that everything is replaced with a single interface for tracking tickets, IT assets, and other records through their full lifecycle. With this approach, managers can better manage demand on IT resources, provide proper oversight and tracking, and get a big-picture view of the status of projects and tasks.
Employees can access real-time visualizations of the status of their requests and tasks. Intuitive interfaces and user-friendly features are hallmarks of ITSM. They enhance the employees' ability to complete their tasks in a timely manner because complex, intimidating processes are simplified and streamlined. In addition, ITSM has paved the way for the development of a variety of self-service capabilities that streamline and simplify work processes.
Ready to learn more?
Whether you’re new to ITSM and ServiceNow or a veteran of the platform, you'll want to watch our on-demand webinar about how to use ITSM to improve employee engagement and experiences.
Host John Ryan, CMO at Crossfuze, and guest David Stevenson, ServiceNow Technical Architect at Crossfuze, discuss strategies to convert legacy IT systems to modern ITSM and transform the IT experience for your company. The webinar provides insights and other information for executives, IT directors, and managers interested in improving IT services, employee engagement and experience using ServiceNow. Watch On-Demand Now.