Digital transformation is a necessity rather than a choice. Digital technology offers so many advantages in speed and quality that’s it’s no longer possible to satisfy your employees, and ultimately your customers, without it, let alone keep pace with your competition. While it may not look exactly the same at different companies, they’re all doing it to some degree—it’s a matter of survival. Digital transformation impacts every department, in every organization, in every industry. Although it has a big return, it can be expensive up front, and it can be difficult to adjust to the amount of tools and data scattered throughout an organization. That’s why IT service management (ITSM) plays a vital role.
Modern ITSM, much like your entire digital transformation strategy, impacts every employee in every department. The great thing about focusing on ITSM in phase one of your digital transformation is that IT leaders are in familiar territory—they’ve spent years perfecting services through
ticketing,
change management,
IT asset management, etc.
Every part of a digital transformation should produce speed and quality. The modern service desk solution is perfecting simple automations to achieve both of these goals.
Better yet, new technology is making service desk software smarter, strengthening the connections to employees and their tools, no matter where digital transformation leads them. Through artificial intelligence, automation, and integrations, ITSM is an easy place to find tangible benefits in your organization’s mission to digitize.
Automating your service desk
Every part of a digital transformation should produce speed and quality. The modern service desk solution is perfecting simple automations to achieve both of these goals.
Service desk automations can route tickets automatically based on any number of data inputs like category or department. Simply landing in the correct queue helps speed up the solution. Plus artificial intelligence can help the requester with suggested categories and subcategories, ensuring correct data input so the ticket is properly routed.
Automatic notifications help expedite complex service delivery workflows. Take an onboarding process, which might include concurrent tasks from human resources, IT, facilities, accounting, security, etc. Rather than an email chain piecing together the right data, a service catalog item can collect the data up front and send automatic notifications and escalations to each service provider.
Of course, faster service delivery is beneficial to employees. They’ll have the time and resources to do their jobs well. But there’s a tangible financial benefit, as well. Faster service delivery means lower operating expenses and more time for the staff to focus on larger goals. In the end, it’ll help the business with its most important financial goals. In fact, 56% of CEOs in a recent
Gartner survey say digital investments improved net profit, and this one is an easy investment to make.
Service desk integrations for digital transformation
One of the goals of digital transformation is to collect all of the data within an organization and put it to work. Your selection of digital tools should work together to give you a complete view of how everything works together in the company.
ITSM, and by extension, employee service management, will help present that 360-degree view. First of all, simply tracking data on devices, applications, and other assets through a service management platform will open new doors for internal service. Now, every ticket from every individual employee will come with a record of the device or tool causing the issue. This will help in troubleshooting, and more importantly, larger organizational decisions about technology. You’ll have a record of every incident involving a certain model of laptop or a particular cloud application, which will help you decide if it’s time for a change.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. As your organization switches to digital tools and records for every function of every department, your
service desk can integrate with these critical pieces of digital transformation. Whether it’s an organization-wide communication platform (like email or Slack), a single sign-on or provisioning tool, a project management software, or a CRM platform, your service desk can build notifications, actions, and automations
for those other tools within a service catalog item.
There are shortcuts everywhere with application integration. If your service desk solution is worth its weight, it will be built for customized interactions with everything else your organization adopts through digital transformation.
ITSM for the customer experience
The focus on digital advantages is to improve the business, and the way to improve the business is to create the best possible customer experience. In starting your digital transformation with ITSM, you can focus on the internal customer—your employees. When they can get what they need, when they need it, they can spend more time creating a positive experience for your external customers.
The best places to work don’t just offer great hours, salaries, and benefits. They also offer a frictionless work environment, where employees are only a click or two away from the resources they need to be great at their jobs. It’s tough to create that environment when every department in the organization wants them to use different forms of communication and different tools to submit requests. That’s why a single-platform service management solution is so convenient for employees. They can drop a request for any department through the
service portal, and as we outlined above, the service providers on the backend can use service desk integrations to deliver the solutions however they see fit.
The employee doesn’t necessarily need to know how service providers fulfill their requests. The employee doesn’t need to recognize the presence of AI, automation, or other smart technology. The customer just wants a timely resolution, which all of these digital tools can help provide. The baseline evaluation for any digital tools should include the impact on the customer’s day-to-day. In the case of an ITSM tool, it’s easy to measure. Those customers all work within your building.
Almost every organization will look to IT for leadership as they move toward digital tools and processes. IT service management is a great place to earn trust, because IT departments all over the world are already making great strides. If they can bring the rest of the organization on board with this type of internal service delivery, they’ll have a foundation for success as new tools and applications are introduced.
