ITSM: The Catalyst to a Profitable Service-oriented Business

IT departments have entered an era in which they are no longer separate from the business but an integral part of organizational success as a true service business. As IT rises to the challenge of aligning their services with the wider business goals of the organization, IT service management (ITSM) has become foundational to that shift.

The Benefits of ITSM

Today, IT teams are taking the processes they built for themselves and using them to introduce new ways of thinking to other parts of the company. With ServiceNow, ITSM becomes the language of service management by automating processes that transform the business into a service business.

The ability to effect change within departments across the organization is about emphasizing service management as the driver of IT rather than the other way around. The goal is to be able to rapidly evolve the IT service model to automate enterprise service relationships for other lines of businesses and their processes. Through ServiceNow, ITSM becomes the starting point for seeing technology as a tool that streamlines processes across the enterprise in service to the business’ customers.

ITSM As Business Integration

While countless organizations have embarked upon ITSM implementation, they often lacked a unifying technological language that could enable creation of customized process automation. More than that, these efforts lacked an ability to unify and integrate those departmentally focused service management processes for a singular view across the enterprise.

Many IT service management automation solutions fall short in myriad ways. From misaligned strategic intent and poor process design to—most of all—a lack of organizational change management to accompany the implementation doomed them to failure.

With ServiceNow, ITSM is foundational to the platform’s ability to adapt and integrate via process-automation development. This ITSM foundation is meant to not only transform processes but to also transform the way in which the workforce thinks about service to the customer.

Better Systems with ServiceNow

The ability to offer better service to the business through better IT via ServiceNow is all about:

• Better change management
• Faster incident resolution
• Higher application availability
• Reduced asset maintenance costs
• More automated processes
• Simpler problem resolution
• Increased IT governance capability

When certified and experienced professionals are fluent in the technology and the context of ServiceNow, ITSM can be the basis for clear business justification of process automation that is understood and embraced by the workforce.

For IT people, that might mean getting on the phone with application owners and other business managers to draw clear links between computer information systems and the services they support. A relevant and accurate configuration management database (CMDB) can provide actionable information and have a positive impact across all service improvement initiatives.

Leveraging ServiceNow Across the Organization

By extending the brand into the service catalog via the ServiceNow content management system (CMS) application, as one example, organizations can develop a branded self-service portal. This portal can significantly affect the number of tickets needing to be handled by the IT organization.

In the portal example, the workforce gains greater control over ticket resolution, which enables the IT organization to devote more time to higher level issues. Collectively, this propels the business towards its goals of being a service-oriented business that can deliver greater value to its customers and make the business stronger and more profitable.