When enterprise service management is the subject, the discussion almost always veers quickly toward technology and vendors. But success here requires more than just the best available technology.
Service Management Begins With Business Processes
Great service management technologies are designed, selected, and implemented with one overarching goal: to improve business operations. To do this, your chosen service management solutions must be driven by business processes and business goals.
This can require ventures into new areas of collaboration and cooperation between your IT and business leaders and teams.
After all, your IT people don’t – and shouldn’t – define business goals or the operational processes intended to achieve them. But the IT team needs to know what those goals and processes are to ensure that enterprise service management solutions are aligned with them.
Similarly, your business counterparts should contribute to – but not drive – decisions about service management technologies. The two areas on which their contributions should focus are user experience and reporting features. User experience directly affects user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity.
Reporting features, including the ability to build dashboards, are how business decision makers turn complex data into actionable information.
The same reporting features IT uses to identify technical challenges and opportunities for improvement may provide similarly useful insights to business decision makers. For example, reports on how business applications are utilized can guide changes to underlying business processes.
User experience and reporting are arguably the two most user-centric areas of focus for IT management. Business users should therefore be involved in the selection and configuration of relevant enterprise service management technologies.
How to Plan for Success
To succeed with business-driven service management, your business needs mechanisms that enable and support collaboration between your IT and business teams. This can begin with something as simple as an email distribution list and official letters .
As those IT-business collaborations grow in number and scope, regular meetings that include business and IT representatives may be more effective than regular emails alone.
At a growing number of companies, IT and business leaders choose to build a service management office (SMO). This parallels the structure and benefits of a project management office (PMO), but focuses on the IT-powered services on which the business relies.
If there is a successful PMO at your business, it may provide a model for your SMO. And an SMO based on a proven PMO may gain the executive sponsorship and support it needs to succeed more quickly.
Collaboration Signals a Growing Organization
Whatever organizational moves you make, they should focus on enabling and supporting collaboration between the IT teams that develop and deliver services and the business teams that use them. And that collaboration should focus on achieving and executing a business-driven approach to services and service management.
As that collaboration grows, it should help ensure that the needs and desires of business users are fully incorporated into technology selection and deployment decisions. This means, for example, how easy it is to create and customize reports may be just as important as more technical considerations. If not more so.
To succeed with service management, your business first needs your IT and business teams to engage in regular conversations about how services are designed and delivered. Wherever possible, that collaboration should begin and gain traction before any and all relevant specific technology choices are made.
Such an approach can help to ensure that every service generates maximum levels of user satisfaction and business value.
Virima: Your Service Management Partner
Virima’s solutions for IT Asset Discovery, ITAM and ITSM are designed to tame your biggest IT and service management challenges. They are also designed to deliver the features and experiences your users need and want.
In addition, they’re built to be easy to use and configure, and to produce useful, actionable reports about your IT environment, for IT managers and business decision makers. These features can help you and your service management team improve IT and business services and support, today and tomorrow.
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
