What do Businesses Want from IT Service Management?

In the business environment today, companies in different industries are progressively dependent on their internal IT organizations to deliver business critical functions and services. As IT services become increasingly embedded into the day to day operations and processes in businesses, more It organizations are choosing to adopt IT service management best practices like the ITIL framework to meet the rapidly changing needs of businesses they serve. 

Below are the reasons why businesses want to avail IT Service Management from different IT companies:

1. Free of Risk Implementation of IT Changes - when changes are poorly tested, planned and communicated to the business, there are significant risks that a newly implemented change in a system could cause a significant service or business interruption. Formalized processes, roles and rules work together to support and create a change management process that communicates clearly with the customers, approves changes through different channels based on their potential impact and determine possible issues with changes in the design stage before they manifest in deployment. 

2. Reduce Operational Cost - IT operations and infrastructure spending represents approximately 60% of total IT spending globally with IT staff making up around half of total IT costs. As they increase in size these IT organizations must hire even more IT staff or otherwise risk becoming excessively burdened by tactical operational processes. Adoption of IT service management can help IT companies measure and scale their operations easier without the need for hiring an excessive staff because of the automated features that reduce manual workload for IT staff. 

3. Improve Efficiency of the Employees and Business - efficiency means getting the most out of the resources that the business has. IT service management has many components that help organizations maximise their resources. One component is IT asset management, the set of processes that are used to improve and optimize life cycle management of IT assets and seek out the most effective strategies for asset disposition and procurement. Processes for continual service improvement are an essential element of the life cycle of each service resulting in ongoing efficiency gains as service functions are optimized over time. 

4. Measure Effectivity - How can you measure the overall effectiveness of an IT organization? You can choose the most important key performance indicators that will be used to measure the overall performance of the team. You need to track this KPI’s over time to know whether your company is improving its effectiveness across the metrics that you set. 

5. Better Customer Service and Customer Experience -  For IT organizations, customers are the users within the business that depend on IT services to support their daily activities. We can list down two components of IT service management that help businesses to improve service delivery and customer experience.

• The service strategy process requires the IT team to align their activities with the needs of the business. This ultimately means that the IT group is working on services that the business wants that leads to a better customer experience. 

• Another important aspect is the incident response system and formalizing ticketing. The incident management process improves service making sure that the IT personnel responds to every incident report or service request that is submitted to them.