Why Service Management Needs to Drive Digital Business Operations

The world has changed as a result of the global pandemic. We’ve likely had more digital transformation in the last ten months than we’d seen in the last ten years. Because organizations have needed to have more intra-team and cross-functional working. They needed more and better collaboration. And they’ve needed to do it remotely.

These digital transformation needs had been bubbling under the surface for a while. Some organizations had already jumped in, many had been dipping their toe in, and some had just been standing beside the water having a look. Now, however, we’ve all been plunged in – some would say “headfirst.” And, in the last year, like it or not, organizations and their employees have gone through a major transformation in terms of how they work, query work, and what they understand the work to be. All kinds of work that supports the way the business functions.

The impact of remote working 

For all those organizations, and all their teams and people, during the early part of the crisis things went crazy. For example, they had to suddenly ramp up their remote, off-site provisioning massively to enable most employees to work away from the office. Then there was the effect on employees, for most of whom working at home was an alien activity.

The crisis’s effect on IT support impacted the informal as well as the formal help channels. For example, if an employee previously had an issue with their technology, before they contacted the IT service desk, they likely asked a colleague for help. Perhaps the person sitting next to them who’s particularly good with technology. The same is also true with queries related to other business functions, such as human resources (HR), say.

Now, with continued remote working, including newer work-from-anywhere approaches, with more employee needs coming directly to the appropriate service desk and support operations, the impact isn’t just the increase in ticket volumes. It’s also related to the expectations of the employees requiring either service or assistance – with the productivity-based needs of remote working adding to the employee expectations that were already buoyed by their superior consumer-world experiences of service and support.

Organizations need a common system of work to thrive 

There’s no logical reason why employees should receive a subpar service and support experience from any of your organization’s business function teams. Plus, if we apply one of the ITIL 4 guiding principles – optimize and automate – then we also need to question whether employees should get differing service experiences across different business functions. Surely, there has to be a single optimized way for employees to get help, no matter the business function?

Plus, that ITIL 4 guiding principle is “optimize and automate.” And, if we can automate more tasks, then we remove them from our daily routines freeing up time to focus on the things that add more value. The whole organization recognizes this when it talks to the digital transformation of back-office operations. Whether this is for HR, facilities, finance, legal, procurement, security, or any other business function that enables employees to do the work they need to do.

For many years, service management capabilities have bled out of IT into other business functions – such as HR and the finance department – because these other teams realized that there are lots of things that they do that are “joined up” in terms of similar operations and outcomes, plus where they need to work across functional boundaries. It made sense for them to work on the same system, using the same processes, to deliver similar ways of working. Which, in turn, delivered a similar, ideally optimized, service experience to employees. Post-pandemic, we all need this optimized, service-management-based approach to work.

It’s a great opportunity for IT teams to add greater business value

The fact that the impact of the pandemic has encouraged so many organizations to accelerate, or finally begin, their digital transformation efforts is a great opportunity for IT. Not only because it involves the increased use of technology. But also because IT can also be an “operations” solution provider. After all, we’ve been doing it for years – we’ve got the tools, we understand the processes, and, importantly, we have the right thinking.

In looking at the opportunity, it’s important to remember the benefits organizations get from service management:

• A value and outcome focus
• Better management of the customer and employee experience
• Efficiency
• Consistency
• Security/reduced risk
• Sustainability/accountability
• Control and governance.

Ultimately, service management provides organizations, and their business functions, with a way to work better. To achieve this, though, they need a simplified way to democratize service management across other teams such as HR, procurement, and finance.

IT now has the opportunity to “run the show”

Service management should be an important facilitator of your organization’s digital transformation needs and ambitions. With IT taking a front seat in leading your organization’s transformation, demonstrating its value in the creation of a digital workplace for employees.

It’s the chance for IT to lead other departments – that are drowning in email or voicemail-message mountains – into a better way of working. Getting the departments “in order” through a more structured methodology and replacing a lot of the manual administrative tasks staff are doing by automating them.It’s a proven opportunity too. With the results of two recent SysAid surveys demonstrating the current level of adoption of service management capabilities outside of IT. For example, the chart below is from a SysAid webinar with ITIL 4 Architect Barclay Rae . It shows the key business functions where the webinar audience was already using service management outside of IT – and, remember, these are people who were likely attending to find out more about what’s possible rather than having already completed their service management journey across their respective organizations.

The second set of results below is from a survey we ran at the end of last year among SysAid customers. You’ll notice that 44% of customers are not using SysAid outside of IT, so 56% of customers are. Plus, you’ll see a variety of non-IT use cases.

We also did a bit of digging into the “Others” response, which was 16%, and found a lot of industry-specific use cases. So, for example, in healthcare you’d have specific departments and use cases that are only relevant for healthcare. One other interesting statistic we discovered through the survey is that customers who are using SysAid in other departments outside of IT are three-times happier.

My hypothesis here is that through the other department use cases, customers are:

• Getting greater value from their SysAid investment
• Uniting the rest of the organization together “under one roof”
• Making life much easier for employees (on both the demand and supply sides).

What commonly holds up this democratization of service management?

So, what’s holding back other departments in your organization from leveraging your proven service management capabilities? Is it to do with educating and training various stakeholders? Is it about engaging the right people? Is it the integration with the existing HR tools or finance systems? Is it around clarity and agreement on requirements? Or is it something else? Well, we asked people and the results of a second webinar poll highlighted many common issues:

The results of this poll were not unsurprising, because we often hear from new clients that they’d struggled to extend the capabilities of their previous ITSM tool. They’d commonly encounter “complexity” issues juggling the various people, process, and technology elements in replicating the workflow automation successes within IT to other teams. Complexity was their enemy.

That complexity is not a good excuse for inaction though. During the pandemic, it became crystal clear that every department across the organization needs a better way of managing the barrage of incoming employee requests and issues. We all need to stop employee requests getting lost in email mountains. Plus, we need to address other issues such as when one person is out sick or on vacation, and who’s monitoring and who’s acting on any given request under their “control”?

Without fit-for-purpose service management capabilities, there’s just no visibility and transparency into what’s happening. And there are a variety of inconsistent, ad hoc ways of working that usually lead to delays, mistakes, and poor employee experiences.

Meeting the new service and support challenges 

The main challenges in sharing IT’s service management capabilities across the organization are not so much to do with the technology or the process. Instead, we need to be ready to understand that collaboration and working together often require more effort and that some people are better at it than others.

We also need to recognize that it’s not going to be about just “switching something new on,” that it’s instead going to be about making sure that we’ve got people on board with the changes to ways of working. That employees have been sold the benefits, seen the value of it, and understand that they just need to engage a little to make it work. It’s classic organizational change management. We ultimately need to make sure that people understand that it’s about working together. And this means sharing more information.

If you want to understand more about the challenges, then I recommend that you watch the webinar from which the following slide is taken:

The result of meeting the above challenges will be that all of your organization’s departments will be better placed to meet the needs and expectations of its employees. Who now expect to have their questions answered in a way that’s fast, easy, and clear. They want to get things done quickly. And, they want a single place to go for all questions and issues in the same way that we do if we’re checking the news, viewing the weather forecast, or looking at any tech-related queries via search engines such as Google or Bing.

Creating a cross-organization support ecosystem for employees

Imagine an employee who wants to check their payroll information or to see how many vacation days they have left. They likely have the HR department’s employee-support telephone number. Maybe they have an email address too. Likewise for the facilities department, who operate a shared mailbox system. And then for the finance department, they have to travel across the office building, knock on a secured door, and hope that someone qualified is available to speak with them (because there’s no agreed way of contacting them via phone or by email).

Now, instead, imagine an employee self-service portal that makes getting support far easier. Something that’s a vast improvement on what’s currently a completely disconnected service experience across departments. Where modern service management best practices allow every business department to create simple – but consistent – service and support experiences for all of your employees. Whether it’s speaking to the finance department regarding an invoice, getting facilities’ help because there’s a broken table in the boardroom, or something else.

It’s the direction that we’re all heading in. With business functions providing a much better service experience, especially now with the increased levels of remote employees and the need to minimize work-preventing issues and the resultant employee lost productivity.