Does My Organization Need IT
Service Management Software?

The scale of modern-day IT service management (ITSM) means that it is impossible to visualize it being at all successful without sophisticated IT service management software support. To successfully deliver fit-for-purpose IT services, organizations must rely on an integrated approach to support their core ITSM processes. This is an approach where the IT service management software helps to get the best out of limited people resources. It’s where the IT service management software not only provides insight into service data and performance, but also workflow and automation capabilities that minimize manual activities to speed up processes, reduce errors, and minimize costs.

Why Should I Choose SysAid?

As part of ITSM, organizations need to manage, monitor, and improve their existing IT services adequately. This implicitly means that they require IT service management software to provide a reliable foundation for their ITSM activities. Without the IT service management software, the data that key processes require is either unavailable, inaccurate or both. The key ITSM processes that will not perform effectively without good IT service management software include:

• Incident management – dealing with issues that may arise with the IT services as efficiently as possible
• Configuration Management and asset management – establishing and maintaining information about the IT infrastructure; this includes hardware, software, and networks plus documentation, staff, and skills – all of which are needed to maintain and deliver the IT services.
• Problem management – establishing the root causes behind any issues, and of course, helping to prevent future issues.
• Change management – assessing and monitoring changes that are essential to delivering IT and business improvements.
• Release management – actually putting those changes (be they to software, hardware, process, or even culture) in place.

ITSM core processes capture vast amounts of data that need to be easily recorded and categorized. Good IT service management software products facilitate this categorization. Categories are pre-set and integrated within the IT service management software and make data capture consistent and meaningful. By presenting the agreed categorization at each and every data capture point, this consistency is ensured across the whole range of ITSM documentation. When updates to categorization are required, the updated categories are presented simultaneously across all the affected processes. This is only possible with sufficiently integrated IT service management software. This coordination can be very important when organizations need to maintain and rely on trend patterns while making changes to the underlying data categorization.

While some IT service management software data is collected automatically via monitoring tools and other automation techniques, most still come from direct entry by service desk staff or end-users entering issues directly into the IT service management software. The quality – and especially the ease of use – of the IT service management software product is essential to the timely and accurate capture of such data. IT service management software that is intuitive and easy to enter data into, and makes categorization and options clear, makes a significant contribution to an organizations’ ITSM effectiveness (and efficiency).

Without accurate data, none of the ITSM processes will be as effective as they should be. The quality of the ITSM data – both captured and maintained – rests heavily upon the quality and suitability of the IT service management software. This refers not only to capturing the data but also in presenting it back to IT employees and management – for both day-to-day activities and gaining insight into IT service and ITSM operations, performance, and improvement opportunities.

Purchasing a single integrated IT service management software product can offer genuine and immediate benefits to an organization, both in the value delivered and also compared to the cost of implementing a different IT service management software product for each ITSM process. Or even compared to the combination of multiple IT service management software products that offer a selection of ITSM-enabling capabilities, for instance, a ticketing system that offers a self-service portal combined with a separate discovery and CMDB product. The benefits of a single IT service management software suite are achieved because:

• Staff are more efficient when a similar interface is provided by all the tool capabilities that they need to use. Learning and using one thing is much quicker and easier than learning – and having to remember – several different ways of working.
• Not having to remember login and passwords for multiple IT service management software products is a big plus – making it easier to move between modules or capabilities.
• The integration of, or overlap between, ITSM processes means that staff are involved in supporting multiple processes and so a single integrated IT service management software product delivers important ease of use. That ease of use translates into time and, therefore, money saved.
• Simple economies of scale suggest that an integrated IT service management software product supporting a range of processes is cheaper than a range of tools. This is not only in terms of licensing and support and maintenance but also in avoiding the need to get the disparate IT service management software products to work together – with the latter both at the initial implementation and then every time one of the IT service management software products is updated by its manufacturer.
• A common data standard precludes the need for conversion and adjustment efforts to use one process’s (and system’s) data in another. The alternative to a single IT service management software suite is ensuring that there is the bi-directional transfer of data at a field level that needs to be verified every time that there is an update to one of the disparate sets of IT service management software products.

So your IT organization needs a fit-for-purpose IT service management software product. Not only will such an IT service management software product be an integral component of your service delivery and IT support capability, having one with all the core ITSM-enabling capabilities will help your IT organization to meet agreed business targets and end-user expectations.

Finally, IT service management software has similar use case scenarios outside of IT – with other corporate service providers such as HR, finance, facilities, and legal. Where the self-service capabilities, service catalog, workflow and automation, and reporting capabilities can be used to manage requests for new services, issues, and changes more efficiently and effectively and with a better customer experience.