The ongoing changes in business operations across the globe have yielded one positive result for the businesses – the digital transformation process has accelerated. With teams working remotely, the need for collaborative, accessible, cloud-based, and secure platforms has never been more urgent. The businesses are increasingly focusing on integrating technologies like cloud and micro-services into the business, find new channels of communication with the target segment, and augmenting technological adoption beyond the IT teams. This is collectively leading to an increased focus on profitability.
These developments are marking the progress of businesses executing digital transformation the IT teams are facing an updated list of requirements. The modern-day IT are in dire need of:
- Increased cohesion between the business model and the IT platform.
- Optimizing the entire IT setup for better internal and external customer experiences.
- Going beyond the minimum risk & compliance standards to ensure comprehensive safety without increasing the costs.
- Facilitating collaboration across the firm with the help of lucid technology integrations and easy-to-use functionalities.
While the expectations are quite clear, the conventional and legacy tools & practices in use are standing as significant hindrances for digital transformation with challenges like rigid architectures and legacy protocols. Moreover, most of these are designed to operate in siloes and have low integration capabilities with other tools and platforms.
The Actual Cost of Legacy tools
Since legacy tools do not have high costs at the surface, it is easy to dismiss them as ‘good enough’ solutions. As you dig deeper, the actual price of having a legacy system emerges. The productivity of the ITSM Helpdesk team goes for a toss, as it has to deal with:
- Flood of Tickets & Calls
- Repetitive Tasks and Redundant Processes
- Ineffective Asset Tracking
- Opacity in Tracking IT Team SLA
- Exacerbated Damage Caused by Otherwise Manageable but Missed Issues
- Lack of Collaboration
In aggregate, these issues make the employees pay with lower productivity and longer lead times for resolution. Even when they can devise the solutions, the lack of time & resources makes the solutions reactive. Proactive measures are neither promoted nor viable.
Digital Transformation Begins with Enhanced Capabilities
Modern ITSM systems serve as the unified platform for change with ITIL processes like change management, release management, asset management and problem management. Well-engineered ITSM platforms tend to provide a seamless digital experience to internal and external customers with the help of easy-to-use self-service and collaboration tools.
The IT Technicians, who were earlier engrossed in redundant tasks and processes, can allocate their person-hours to more value-generating tasks as the routine tasks are automated with intelligent ticket routing. Functionalities like automated alarm-based ticketing, SLA Monitoring, and severity tagging of issues help transform the solution to proactive fronts. It ensures that the issues are flagged and solved before they snowball into emergencies.
Enhance People, Process, and Technology with ITSM
Don’t plan on getting just another ITSM tool, to increase the impact of ITSM capabilities, the digital transformation trajectory should not be seen to add more ‘data and technology’ to people, process, and existing technological capabilities
ITSM changes would reflect the same principle and necessitate critical changes in the way people, process, and technology functions operate, interact, and grow. That is what differentiates digital transformation from digitalization.
Here is how you can map this transformation:
- Begin with understanding the people impact
The people should have the right skills and perspective to work with new technological approaches adopted in IT Service Delivery & Support functions. While you make vital changes to attain this stead-state, you have to pay attention to the people who constitute your Team. That is how you can make the updated processes more tailored for the internal customers and bring their perspective into consideration. Those are the areas beyond the scope of technological change that may not dictate the direct path of digital transformation but will impact the long run.
Integration of Organizational Change Management technology into the business’ operations has to precede the people changes. While it is a new area in ITIL, it is necessary to make this transition as smooth as possible for the people involved in the process. - Reengineer the Process
The fundamental shift here has to come in terms of the focus area. Instead of focusing on how each ITSM/ITIL process rolls out, your eyes should be fixed on what it is designed to achieve. By optimizing for that result, you can reconfigure the process or even identify new elements, directions, or channels for execution.
ITIL adoption can help in bringing that perspective to reengineering the processes. This set of ITSM best practices provide directions on highlighting the impact of optimizing for the underlying end-result, technological innovation, and employee experience in the context of service management. The goal should be to deliver ITSM capabilities in the workplace that are comparable to consumer-facing platforms’ performance. - Evaluate the Scope, Need, and Scale of Technological Changes.
Once you have established the scope of transformation in the people and process functions, you can leverage technology to achieve and even outdo the planned changes. ITSM Technology, with the right people and process should help accelerate the planned changes and automate with new capabilities such as workflow management the focus should be to optimize and automate thereby add value to attaining the business goals.
These directives guide how technological capabilities should unfold:
- It is imperative to focus on producing self-service capabilities that can match consumer-facing platforms in terms of ease-of-use and the readily available access to information.
- Automation design capabilities that supplement the productivity of non-developers to create workflows without using any code to simplify their work and help them produce more value.
- AI-enabled capabilities that automate redundant tasks with projects like intelligent ticket processing add value to legacy processes with initiatives like virtual agents and enhance existing systems’ capabilities with functionalities like predictive analytics.
- Leverage the ITSM platform by other business functions for Enterprise service management capabilities such multilevel approvals, service requests for IT, Travel, Employee onboarding and more.
- Robust IT asset management (ITAM) capabilities are table stakes in digital transformation an ITSM platform must support auto asset discovery and scanning via QR codes, RFID and more and map well with a comprehensive, flexible configuration management database (CMDB).
In Conclusion
Looking at digital transformation as a way to transform the business with a focus on people, process and technology open up new avenues for rethinking and reengineering existing operations. ITSM, as the central point for people, processes, and technological interactions, can serve as the focal point for digital transformation with the help of the right platforms like Motadata ServiceOps. Motadata Serviceops is a modern ITSM platform which is ITIL Compliant & Pink verified, makes IT delivery seamless across all business operations.