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It’s now common knowledge that managing change is an essential part of digital transformation. But what most people don’t realize is that the first step to effectively managing change is service mapping.
As we move into an era where enterprises are increasingly dependent on complex IT ecosystems, those with a detailed understanding of their services can see how changes ripple across the enterprise and minimize any disruption. Understanding how changes can impact the entire enterprise and the service dependencies that drive your IT infrastructure are essential components of change management.
Check out: What’s new in service mapping in 2023?
Understanding the service ecosystem
Service mapping is the process of collecting and analyzing your customer’s needs, both within individual departments and across the organization as a whole. The aim is to understand how every service you provide relates to each other and how they affect your customers overall experience.
One way to understand your customer’s needs is by using service ecosystem maps, which show all services provided by an organization or business unit in a visual representation.
Service mapping helps companies understand their internal processes and relationships between services, as well as how these processes impact the customer experience. It provides a framework for teams to evaluate the quality of their offering via a visual process map that shows which steps need improvement, how they fit together and where the breakdowns occur.
Identifying the change events
Change events are the catalyst for change. They can be anything from a new product launch to an employee leaving the company, or even something as small as an internal reorganization.
Identifying your change events is critical to building a comprehensive service map. This will help you to:
- Know what you’re working with
- Prioritize your services based on the impact that they have on other services (both positively and negatively)
Prioritizing service impact
Once you’ve mapped the services, identify the most important service by determining which has the greatest impact on your business as a whole. The service owner of this service should be assigned to lead the project. You must also determine which stakeholders have a vested interest in its success and assign them accountability for their role in making that happen.
In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for organizations to receive reports from equipment and network monitoring systems about failed alerts that weren’t investigated or resolved until too late.
Service organizations find themselves spending valuable time, resources, and money on unnecessary outages that can ultimately lead to dissatisfied customers.
Monitoring manual transaction activity is a key component of any service organization as well. Without proper mapping, manual effort is put into determining the criticality and impact of alerts.
Service mapping is critical to your change management plan
Service mapping is the process of understanding the services and the relationships between them. It can be used to identify dependencies between services, as well as impacts that change in one service may have on another service. Service mapping also helps you identify key stakeholders in service delivery.
Service mapping is critical for your change management plan because it enables you to determine what changes are needed and how they will impact your organization.
1. No more guesswork about ‘what changed’ in your IT environment
With service mapping, there’s no more guesswork about what business needs are at risk. Teams can identify the issue, automate the creation of an incident, prioritize it and drive appropriate escalations and communications with a clear business impact.
A service map also enables you to determine if there are any known issues that could impact your application’s availability. By creating accurate dependency maps with service discovery, you can understand how well each application works within the overall system of applications.
2. Identify quickly what caused a service outage and respond immediately
Service outages can be disastrous. To mitigate the effects of a service outage, you need to understand how your current services are distributed and identify bottlenecks that could cause major disruption.
A service map provides an in-depth view of your current service architecture. The benefits of this analysis include identifying any areas of risk and potential bottlenecks that may cause major disruptions as well as providing recommendations for remediation.
Service mapping helps you train staff on how to handle outages, so that they can resolve issues before they negatively impact business operations.
3. Determine risks and prioritize addressing them
A critical first step in managing service delivery, or any important project or initiative, is to map out the services that are involved and identify the risks to those services.
Leveraging service mapping will allow you to automate ticket creation for high-priority incidents, streamline event analysis and reporting by automatically extracting data from tickets, and even let customers understand exactly what service failures occurred when they happened so they can take measures to avoid them in the future.
Read: How to use service mapping for risk management?
4. Understand relationship between services and reduce risks
Service mapping examines the relationships between services and the components that deliver them.
A service-focused change management program enables you to use your CMDB as the foundation for a thorough impact analysis — taking into account all relevant information about the services, their dependencies, and dependencies on third-party systems.
With these relationships fully understood, it becomes possible to automate risk calculations based on each change request’s impact on existing services. This results in a more accurate assessment of risk and a much smaller change advisory board (CAB) under which approvals can be managed.
How to effectively implement service mapping for your organization? Find out.
Eliminate guesswork and prevent service outages with Virima
Service mapping is the first step of identifying how a change will affect the services you provide and how you can design effective communication strategies to manage them. By doing this, you can ensure that your organization is ready when a change event occurs—and it will happen.
With dynamic visual depictions of your IT infrastructure, application dependencies, business services, and ITSM process relationships, ViVID (Virima Visual Impact Display) Service Mapping provides a clear understanding of the value of asset management and its impact on the health of your business.
It’s critical to map all of your business services and dependencies as part of change management and service impact analysis when you are providing support to a customer. A standard approach to mapping these services can be done efficiently by using the ViVID Service Mapping tool.
The ViVID Service Mapping platform can help your team map not just the applications and services, but also the network infrastructure required to support them. Spanning both private clouds and public clouds, you can visualize how business services and applications depend on each other.
As your organization makes a change, understanding the impact of that change can be difficult. ViVID helps you visualize and understand the dependencies between services and applications. Use service maps to identify what could be impacted during change windows or if something could go wrong as a result of changes.
Do you need more help with change management or service mapping? Talk to the experts at Virima and get started right away!
