ITSM platforms have become essential in supporting end-users as their work becomes more centred in technology. But not all ITSMs are built equal, and a misaligned ITSM might be hurting more than it's helping. Here's how you can tell.
As businesses become more technology-dependent and the breadth of technology used within the business gets wider and wider, having the right IT Service Management (ITSM) platform is becoming increasingly critical.
Every day, IT teams grapple with a range of IT service tasks, from simply incident resolution to change management, creating knowledge articles to enable a higher rate of self-service and more. A great ITSM platform that is aligned with the needs and goals of the business can elevate the service management of the IT team, automating repeatable tasks and using AI to enhance their service management.
Unfortunately, many IT teams are stuck with outdated or misaligned ITSM systems that can’t keep pace with their business, are costing the business too many resources to manage, or are simply holding back the growth of the business.
So, how do you know when it’s time to switch your ITSM platform? Here are four signs that suggest it might be time for a change.
1. Your IT service delivery is struggling and suffering from bottlenecks
The most obvious sign that your ITSM is failing your business is going to be readily apparent – your IT service is letting down your end-users, and you’re probably going to be hearing about it from them. When your IT team is unable to deliver a high level of service to your end users, it can be a warning sign that your ITSM is falling short and potentially creating bottlenecks.
Your ITSM should be elevating your IT service, reducing resolution times, enabling self-service resolution of tickets, and giving your team a single system of record and action to work from. Unfortunately, if you’re using an ITSM that isn’t aligned with your needs, this can’t happen. This results in wasted time on repetitive tasks that should be automated, missed SLAs, and employee dissatisfaction from both IT and end users.
You can find yourself in this situation when:
- You’re stuck on a legacy ITSM that hasn’t kept pace with your evolving needs
- Your ITSM hasn’t been configured to properly handle your processes or integrated into your key systems to automate actions across systems.
- The business has highly specific processes and requirements that you’ve attempted to fit into the mould of an out-of-the-box ITSM.
If one of these sounds familiar, it might be time to start looking at options for a new ITSM platform.
2. Your ITSM can’t scale with your business
As your business grows, the role of IT becomes more and more important, and the need for a robust ITSM is critical. Business growth tends to increase the complexity of your technology stack – with more teams and increasingly complex processes requiring new software and tools to handle this work. During this growth phase, many businesses bolt on new systems and platforms, with each fulfilling a new requirement. This eventually results in the business needing to consolidate systems to eliminate the data silos that have cropped up across the organisation.
This scalability is where traditional ITSM platforms may fall short. The baseline requirement is that your ITSM can keep up as you bring on new users, manage more complex change requests, and integrate into new systems that you deploy. But the real question should be whether your ITSM can be the system (or one of a small group of systems) you consolidate work into.
If your ITSM isn’t set up to handle a broader Enterprise Service Management (ESM), then this could be a sign to switch. ESM is the extension of ITSM principles across the wider enterprise, and ESM platforms can consolidate service management from multiple teams (from marketing to HR and even Legal) into a single system. An ESM will allow the business to create a multi-purpose service portal and knowledge base that handles a wide range of services, giving you the technological flexibility you need to scale without data silos.
3. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Is too high
Your financial relationship with your ITSM might start out great. You got a nice discount on your licensing, some free development hours thrown in and a proposed ROI that got your CFO very excited. But then, the relationship started to sour.
First, there was the annual fee increase. Then, the “out of scope” features that you had to pay extra for. You start seeing that the ROI might not be as attractive as you thought. Then suddenly, a critical feature that you paid for custom development on has been “productised”, and you now have to pay for it separately if you want to continue using it.
These situations are something we hear about all the time, and they’re driving up the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of ITSM platforms to the point where it is eroding any ROI they are delivering. Licensing, development and internal management of your ITSM should not cost more than the benefits that the platform delivers through workflow automation, AI-powered self-service, risk reduction, and reduced ticket escalation.
If the TCO of your ITSM is outstripping the time and cost savings from faster resolution times and increased self-service resolution, then it might be worth your time to look elsewhere.
4. Your ITSM is holding back innovation
In modern businesses, It teams fulfil three overarching roles:
- Maintenance – keeping the lights on, resolving incidents and ensuring end users have the tech they need to get their work done.
- Growth – driving innovation and productivity improvements through new technology, systems and automation.
- Risk mitigation – reducing the risk of downtime, data breaches and other risks through cybersecurity, robust infrastructure and more.
In many IT teams, a majority of their time is spent on maintenance and risk mitigation, with little capacity left for growth and innovation. An ITSM that relies on manual processes and doesn’t have features that increase the productivity of the IT team can quickly stifle the desire to spend more time on growth initiatives.
So that you can free up more time for growth initiatives, your ITSM should actively work to lighten the maintenance and risk mitigation workload by automating repetitive tasks and augmenting human service with AI. Intelligent ticket routing, self-service AI, remediation recommendations, and AI-powered knowledge base creation – these are just a few ITSM features to look out for that can free up the team to focus on innovation.
If you’re still stuck maintaining the status quo with few options in your ITSM to improve IT productivity, then it’s going to be extremely difficult to drive innovation with limited resources available.
Seeing the signs? Switch to Servicely
If you’re up to this point in the article and thinking, “Damn, this all sounds too familiar”, then it might be a good time to chat with our team.
Your ITSM should be working to elevate your IT team, not holding it back. If your service is struggling, you can’t scale your ITSM across your business, your ITSM is costing too much and holding back innovation, it’s time for a change.
We built Servicely as a highly adaptable and configurable enterprise service management platform, and AI built natively into the platform. If you want to learn how Servicely can transform your ITSM, reach out to our team below.