Investing in ITIL-Aligned ITSM Technology

By this point, we hope you’ve bought into the benefits of, and need for, ITIL—the IT service management (ITSM) best practices framework—and you’re ready to employ it to make a real difference in your company.

But both ITIL and ITSM require the right blend of people, processes, and technology to be successful. Your company could attempt to adopt ITIL without fit-for-purpose ITSM technology, but the result would leave people “working harder, not smarter”—able to employ a number of ITIL best practices, but not necessarily efficiently or effectively

The IT department has used technology to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness in other business functions for over 30 years, and it’s just as applicable for ITSM and IT support.

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ITIL is about optimizing IT service delivery and support to make business operations better. And while having a highly skilled team and better processes helps, your IT function won’t reach its full potential without the right technology to support them.

So how will an ITSM solution support your ITIL adoption and IT operations? The answer is that it’s multidimensional. It begins with specific ITIL process support, offering function-based capabilities across some or all of ITIL’s 26 processes.

How a fit-for-purpose ITSM solution helps with ITIL adoption (and IT operations)

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Then there are capabilities that run through multiple processes, which turn the best practices process designs into operational realities. This takes the benefits of process optimization and magnifies them through the power of the technology. For instance, a fit-for-purpose ITSM solution will provide:

Workflow and automation. It’s what the IT department has been delivering for other lines of business since the 1980s, although the technology has advanced considerably since then. This speeds up processes, involves the right people as and when they are needed, and provides transparency into the current status of a transaction. It also allows repetitive manual tasks to be replaced with automation—saving the IT department time and money while delivering a better customer experience to employees and external customers.

A single system of record. Are you still using email and spreadsheets to manage IT? This lack of workflow and automation not only slows things down, but also misses the potential to benefit from insight into the data collected along the way. Having a single system of record, or a “single source of truth” facilitates so much more than configuration management. It supports IT activities across processes—such as using incident and problem management data for change management—and provides a rich source of data for performance management, analysis, and reporting. This gives your IT department the ability to identify trends and improvement opportunities across both operations and services.

Capabilities to make the lives of both IT staff and end users easier, such as self-service, service catalog, knowledge management, social collaboration, and mobile access to actions and data. These are modern service provider capabilities that can also be used outside of IT, in other business functions such as HR and facilities, to speed up service delivery and reduce costs while delivering a better customer experience. In many ways, these conveniences are expected by employees, as they demand that corporate IT matches the superior customer experiences they receive in their personal lives.

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Think of the purchase of an ITSM solution as more than just IT expenditure—it’s an investment in IT operations and overall business success.

It’s a business investment where the right ITSM solution, along with associated people and process changes, will benefit a company more than it outlays on the technology, process improvement, training, and other aspects of organizational change. And given the transactional nature of many IT and ITSM activities, it’s reasonably simple to convert the estimated time and effort savings—realized through the introduction of workflow and automation, and self-service in particular—into real financial benefits. These savings stem from reducing and potentially removing: manual tasks, delays, miscommunications, duplication of effort, and wasted efforts. And, depending upon your situation, the opportunity to consolidate multiple teams and technologies will reap additional financial benefits.

Where possible, and depending on your industry, time savings can also be viewed from a business perspective, i.e. that the prevention or quick resolution of incidents, especially major incidents, leads to higher availability and fewer revenue losses due to business-affecting IT failures. This might not be appropriate to your company, but if it is, it can be a big part of the ITIL benefits statement.

However, before the technology business case can be created, you’ll need to understand where and how the new ITSM solution will support IT and business operations.

How to justify the investment in a fit-for-purpose ITSM solution

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There are many available ITSM solutions and vendors, but at this stage you should be looking at what you want, or need, to achieve rather than who can help you to achieve it.

The creation of high-level functional requirements will help you to better understand the potential benefits to be realized. For instance, end user self-service might be a “must have” capability—not because of the potential to save money, but because the business demands it as an expected capability of any modern service provider. There will also be related financial benefits to be calculated as processes are shortened and some IT activities eliminated.

It’s important to split requirements between “must haves” and “nice to haves” early on, as the loss of a desirable requirement in the eventual solution choice might adversely affect overall return on investment. In reality, any “nice to have” capability with a really large benefit would most likely soon move into the “must have” column, as a no-brainer addition or change to current operations. Why wouldn’t you add something that saves a significant amount of IT costs?

Understanding your requirements

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• Decision to select a SaaS versus on-premise solution, with the associated management cost differentials

• Ability to quickly prove compliance, reducing operational costs and preventing the incurrence of financial penalties

• Ease of integration with other IT and business systems, which will save on manual effort and errors as well as open up new revenue-generating or cost-saving opportunities

• Availability of other non-core ITSM capabilities to further improve quality of service while reducing operational costs

• Quality of the native reporting capabilities that provide the backbone for performance assessment and the platform for the identification and exploitation of future improvement opportunities

• Ability to easily change or grow the solution over time, allowing for more users and increased maturity of ITSM operations

Outside of the functional requirements, the non-functional requirements also come with significant opportunities to realize benefits for the business case. These include the:

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When selecting a new ITSM solution, it’s easy to be so laser-focused on what the technology can do that another important opportunity is missed—the opportunity to tap into your existing ITSM solution provider for more than just technology.

Some of these additional opportunities are easily apparent—the provider can provide the professional services capabilities and training that cover both the technology and the processes that will be used, helping to improve the customer’s ITSM maturity.

But some opportunities are not so obvious. These include the access to customer communities that not only provide answers related to questions and issues around the technology, but also ITSM best practices and maybe even advice on the management of third-party technology and services. Or the ability to learn from existing customers who are further ahead in their ITSM journey—customers who can offer advice on both the shortcuts and potential pitfalls to avoid when your company is looking to improve its IT operations and customer experience.

How ITSM solution vendors such as ServiceNow can help customers improve their ITSM maturity

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Then there are two other key opportunities that deserve a slightly deeper dive:

Access to the accumulated learnings from hundreds of customer projects. While there are ITIL best practices and other alternatives such as COBIT, the right solution provider will share the very practical learnings they have accumulated through years of experience supporting their customers’ projects and day-to-day operations. This might relate to using the technology, optimizing processes, people-related change, or all three of these. So it’s important to remember that you aren’t just investing in the technology, but also the knowledge, skills, and experience unique to a well-established provider.

The addition of new capabilities through a regular release cadence. The first ITSM solutions appeared at the end of the 1980s along with the first version of the ITIL best practices framework. Much has changed since, not only with ITIL best practices, but also related to IT and business landscapes—and the speed of this change is quickening. If a solution provider has a regular and rich release cadence (most commonly seen with cloud solutions), then customers have access to new ITSM, and potentially non-ITSM, capabilities more quickly—capabilities necessary to meet the rapidly changing demands on IT and ITSM professionals and the people they serve.

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Next steps

If you believe in the benefits of ITIL, articulate to your company’s leadership how ITSM technology will help both IT operations and business outcomes. IT operations lends itself well to demonstrating the efficiencies and savings associated with new capabilities such as workflow and automation, self-service, knowledge management, and insight into performance—making it easy to justify an investment in an ITIL-aligned ITSM solution.

Visit https://www.servicenow.com/solutions/improve-it-service-delivery.html—your source for ITSM insights and best practices—whether you’re just getting started or are well into your ITSM implementation.

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