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Navigating the Weeds of IT Service Management

When we talk about “the weeds” in IT, we’re often talking about IT Service Management (ITSM). What gets weedier than conjuring and developing the appropriate service delivery framework? Read on for the 5 signs that suggest you need some ITSM help.

5 Indicators that You Need IT Service Management Help

It’s always hectic in delivering IT services – when you’re administering changes for end users, you’re hustling to resolve complex tickets for exasperated customers, knocking down the service desk ticket backlog, testing new operating systems over a myriad of changing technologies – it never ends!

We’re talking about IT Service Management. If you’re wondering if you’re the only one, read what one expert had to say recently:

“Companies that don’t modernize their IT service desks to adequately support their new digital business will face dwindling prospects and could well find themselves in the company of the 75 percent of S & P 500 companies that will be replaced by 2027. Perhaps the most dangerous consequence will be the difficulty of attracting and retaining top talent if systems don’t empower them to be productive and successful,” says Robin Purohit, Group President, Enterprise Solutions Organization for BMC Software, Inc.

Are you keeping up as well as you should, or is it time to get IT Service Management help? Here are the five leading indicators:

1. Your helpdesk isn’t streamlined and efficient.

Modern service desk environments use a powerful ITIL-based platform that acts as a single point of contact for incidents, requests for service, ticket management, and resolution. Every asset and user type have a centralized support model with an associated SLA and a pre-defined workflow, ensuring rapid resolution of problems and making change management simple. If your service desk is fragmented and unwieldy, you’re wasting time – and costing your business money.

2. Your help desk isn’t user-friendly enough for today’s on-the-go employees.

They need access to effective solutions 24x7x365, often logging in from mobile devices. Is your desk set up to accommodate them with solutions based on their specific roles and configurations? If not, you’ll end up with ticket backlog and productivity losses for affected employees.

3. You don’t proactively identify problems.

Day to day workloads have you too mired in reactively attempting to manage ticket resolutions. To be proactive, careful tracking of all incidents, problems, and changes are essential. If you don’t have the resources to document them thoroughly, the systems to manage the design – you won’t be able to identify trends and get to the underlying cause of problems. An ITSM system will track everything for you automatically. Quickly identifying degradation in SLAs, early recognition of problem tickets, and related trending are fundamental to our offering

4. Other business units are assuming IT functions.

It happens a lot in these days when everybody’s a tech expert (or thinks they are) and subscription services so easy to originate. Maybe your company has told marketing it’s fine for them to download their own CRM and other solutions without your help. It’s fine with you, too – as long as their apps don’t interfere with any of your other hundreds of programs. Unfortunately, you won’t know that until they start causing problems. Then the end users expect YOU to resolve their issues. You can prevent situations like this with ITSM remote infrastructure management, provisioning, and asset management solutions, which allow departments to acquire the capabilities they want while keeping the organization as a whole intact.

5. You don’t have the resources to adopt the best practices.

By “best practices”, we mean a service delivery framework grounded in ITIL principles, the gold standard of IT service management. The ITIL framework provides you control of IT functions and affords you the methodology to establish controls to properly structure your IT shop to optimize how your infrastructure and end users are supported – how IT business services are delivered and managed. Service success is a journey and takes time to implement and sustain. The best solution may be a tailored ITSM roadmap based in ITIL principles to optimize SLA’s with sustainable governance and business rules to safeguard infrastructure and maximize end user productivity.

We recognize that’s a lot of acronyms to track, and more importantly a lot of challenges impacting your IT infrastructure. Simplifying the complexity of ITSM is an area of expertise within our Connection Technology Services Group. Don’t hesitate to give us a call for some help.

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