The rate of digital transformation is accelerating
Don’t let IT service management (ITSM) hold you back
Operational efficiency and customer engagement are top priorities for the technology leader. The pandemic has led to even greater urgency for digital transformation. To meet customer expectations, IT must be able to rise to the challenge of delivering solutions at market speed – i.e. not be constrained by existing internal processes and technologies.
Organisations must understand the critical factors of business performance and assess how IT can facilitate and enable it to emerge more competitively. This acceleration can provide IT with opportunities for new investments, and to replace legacy systems. IT itself must recognise how to be able to act decisively.
To be at the forefront of digital transformation, IT needs to adopt modern delivery practices, develop a flexible IT workforce, possess a strategy to turn data into an asset and understand the role that automation can play in building customer trust (both internal and external) while maintaining or reducing costs.
To achieve all of this, IT must consider its own service management capability and be prepared to transform it to meet the needs of its own customers.
Today's ITSM imperative can be distilled into five key areas
Transform legacy, highly rigid IT infrastructure library capability to enable market speed.
Lead the shift to Enterprise Service Management, and set the standard for Employee Experience.
Change the operating model to support as-a-service partnerships and short tech lifecycles.
Automate to support a highly engineered self-help, self-heal experience and support lower cost to serve.
Improve data quality to drive and sustain AI Ops or No Ops models.
Let's consider some of those ITSM imperatives
Employee experience
KPMG firms’ experiences with HR shows that a positive employee experience is essential in attracting and retaining talent. Employee (i.e. customer) centric ITSM is crucial in keeping staff productive, in serving their own customers and improving overall profitability. A transformed ITSM function should be employee centric.
Support for as-a-service relationships and short tech cycles
This is a pre-requisite for ITSM now. With cloud computing, a business function can be up and running with a new application in minutes. However, your IT function may still be providing first line support, so a flexible ITSM is necessary to add and remove as-a-service support agreements on technologies that may be here today, gone tomorrow.
Highly engineered self-help and self-heal
Without automation, it is unaffordable to grow the IT team in proportion to the number of systems and users it supports. A modern ITSM platform can enable this, but crucially, you need to get the process right so that you still have human intervention at just the right moments.
Use of data to drive ‘AI Ops’ or No Ops’ models
A modern ITSM platform provides better access to data which AI tools can exploit to automate support. This allows your workforce to direct its focus on high value work (such as digital transformation initiatives).
Reach out for help with ITSM
What does modernising your ITSM involve? Do you need a new technology platform? Can you do it on your own?
There is more to ITSM transformation than just implementing a new technology platform. For maximum effectiveness, there is an opportunity to adopt leading practices for people, processes, service delivery, data, reporting and governance, as well as deploying world class technology.
At a practical level, working with an organisation can help you to identify ‘what good looks like’ for ITSM and determine how to bring that to life in your own organisation though visualisation and validation. Modern ITSM platforms (especially ServiceNow) can be pre-configured with leading industry practice, which significantly reduces the time and resources needed for implementation. Crucially, a partner brings with them use-case experience of past implementations, which can stop you from going down blind alleys (together with the associated re-work).
The right organisation can help you approach an ITSM transformation holistically. They can help optimise the IT organisation around the platform to support a business-wide digital transformation. One example of this is people and roles — being able to tap into leading practice can help you to raise your effectiveness.
Lastly, a partner organisation can help you to transform your ITSM in the context of wider business drivers. For example, a common driver for ITSM transformation might be the need to change your ITSM platform as your legacy application licenses reach a renewal stage. On the other hand, it might be a more significant business change that drives your ITSM transformation, such as a business acquisition.
The right organisation can guide your ITSM transformation in the context of the environment in which you as an IT function are operating and the different priorities that brings.
ITSM is no longer just the domain of ITIL professionals — it has become too important. Instead, it needs to fit into an organisation wide plan (and culture) for digital transformation.
KPMG Powered Enterprise | IT is ready to help.
