Table of contents
What is relationship mapping?
Relationship mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of an organization’s network of IT asset relationships. It is not just one snapshot in time—it is a tool that will continue to evolve as your organization grows and changes strategy. These relationships can be physical (e.g., locations or buildings), organizational (e.g., departments), or process-based (e.g., how information moves from one person to another).
It is hard to accurately picture how relationships are playing out in your organization with only pen and paper. Considering that many departments use the same assets or many assets are used by the same department—it can be hard to track or even know what assets are present within your network. The initial map shows current relationships but does not show new opportunities, nor does it help you visualize short-term and long-term goals more clearly.
Relationship maps are sometimes called service maps, process maps, or value chain maps because they show how various services interact to deliver value to customers. They help you visualize where there might be gaps in your team’s knowledge or expertise or areas where someone needs additional resources to fill a gap.
Relationship mapping helps your team work efficiently and avoid duplicating asset purchases that have already been done. Your relationship map is a dynamic asset that will evolve as your organization grows, changes strategy, brings in new assets, and more.
In this article, we will discuss the concept of relationship mapping and how organizations can benefit from relationship mapping tools.
What does a relationship map contain?
Relationship mapping is a technique that helps you visualize these relationships by mapping out your product or service offerings and the needs they fulfill. Here is a list of aspects that these maps usually contain:
- Asset data: In-depth information about the assets, like owners, departments, servers, asset names, licenses, usage data, and more.
- Key stakeholders: Individuals or departments directly or indirectly connected to these assets. They might be internal stakeholders, such as managers or employees, or external stakeholders, such as customers.
- Products and services: Any service that the IT asset impacts if it stops functioning. Examples might be software products, services like a call center, and more.
- Resource map: A diagram showing where your organization’s structure resources are located and what types of resources they are (people, equipment, software).
- Relationship level depth: A filter that helps stakeholders hone into each aspect of the network and obtain detailed information about the asset and related service.
Benefits of relationship mapping for IT teams
Service mapping is an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes, enabling them to keep track of their customer service processes and workflow. By understanding the relationships between your IT assets, companies can identify weak areas that need improvement, helping them boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here is a look at some of the biggest benefits of service mapping:
- Increased efficiency: Service mapping helps organizations pinpoint areas to optimize processes for improved efficiency. For example, companies often do not realize how long it takes from a customer request to completion until it is mapped out in detail. It allows them to identify any unnecessary steps you can eliminate or resources that can be better utilized.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Mapping out the customer service journey ensures that customers get responses faster and more accurately. It is because the entire process has been streamlined and the team knows what assets are impacted in order to solve any problem quickly and efficiently.
- Improved change management: With an overall view of the IT infrastructure, businesses can anticipate any issues that may arise due to changes in technology, business systems, or new products/services being introduced. Having this insight allows teams to put measures into place before customers notice potential network changes problems. It means they do not have to wait for a resolution or seek help elsewhere.
- Better team collaboration: Service mapping gives team members visibility into each other’s roles, so everyone knows what is expected of them and how their role contributes to creating an excellent customer experience every time. By understanding how different departments work together, teams are better equipped to collaborate effectively on projects as needed without disrupting critical customer service processes or tasks related to keeping customers happy and loyal.
- Clear benchmarks: Because service maps accurately represent how long requests or inquiries typically take to complete, organizations have clear benchmarks by which they can measure success against their competitors and industry standards. It makes it easier for companies to focus on improving specific parts of the service process if they lag behind their peers in speed or accuracy when responding to customers’ needs or complaints.
- Accurate reporting: With all processes mapped out clearly, reporting becomes much simpler as there is clarity over who is involved in any given task or how often IT assets are functional. You can measure the network’s uptime with greater accuracy, allowing for improved decision-making when reflecting upon performance data.
Overall, it is easy to see why service mapping has become such a vital part of modern business operations across all industries. From its ability to help improve efficiency throughout entire workflows to increasing transparency between teams ensuring customer satisfaction remains high across all touch points during their—experience with your company.
How can you leverage Virima’s relationship mapping tool?
The emergence of digital transformation initiatives, cloud migration projects, and resource optimization efforts have made it increasingly important for IT teams to understand their IT assets comprehensively.
Virima’s service mapping tool is designed to provide comprehensive views of IT infrastructures. It offers holistic infrastructure and network maps that show how services are connected across data centers, clouds, networks, and endpoints. You can use this information to assess the efficacy of an organization’s layout, identify efficiency problems, track performance trends, plan outages, ensure compliance with industry standards, and more.
In addition to these infrastructural benefits, it also provides DevOps-style service topology views that display workflows between application components. It helps visualize and create complex interaction models between different systems in real-time, allowing for quick adjustments and optimizing service delivery times and other performance metrics. The tool also visualizes communication flows to show port numbers used for host-to-host communications, making it easier for IT teams to troubleshoot cross-location networking issues.
For application dependency mapping (ADM), Virima offers tools that allow IT teams to tap into a range of applications such as “Epic” or “Payroll” for detailed insight into their specific relationships between individual components. They can even map abstract business services consisting of many apps like “Order Entry” or “HR” without breaking down individual elements first.
In terms of on-premise/cloud/hybrid setup mappings, Virima supports the ability to map all three scenarios at once—ensuring a comprehensive view regardless of where data resides or how it moves between locations.
Overall, Virima’s service mapping tool is an invaluable resource for any organization looking to gain complete visibility into their infrastructures—on-premise or cloud-based. It helps you understand how they all interact with one another to make better decisions around resource utilization or digital transformation projects.
Map any service with great depth and ease using ViVID Service Mapping™
Map your relationships using Virima’s service mapping tool
Relationship mapping is an essential tool for IT teams to maintain a consolidated view of the entire technological infrastructure and its associated relationships. As such, leveraging the right software can save time, effort, and money in system overhauls or refreshing processes.
Virima offers a user-friendly service mapping tool that maps the entire array of technological relations with ease and great accuracy. Hence, this tool is incredibly useful when mapping out relationships between technology components. With Virima’s comprehensive yet intuitive platform and user-friendly mapper, users can configure their relationship maps quickly with start/end nodes and link them together as needed.All these features greatly benefit IT professionals in understanding their infrastructural environment better and scoping the exact impacts of changes to those structures globally. To utilize the full potential of Virima’s robust service mapping software, we recommend you book a demo with us to implement service mapping in your organization.
