Heading to the gym, you have access to so many amenities in one place: cardio equipment, private studios, a pool, free-weight area, a basketball court. Imagine if those conveniences were located at separate facilities, forcing you to have separate memberships and make different trips to achieve a well-rounded workout – it doesn't bode for the best experience.
In a different context, think about your employees' experience as they search for answers across multiple platforms for service providers. While Legal and IT work different muscle groups in the business, consolidating their resources into one service management platform can unify your organization and improve the employee experience.
Departments cohabitating in one IT service management (ITSM) platform resonates across the
guiding principles in the ITIL 4 framework. Cultivating a shared space helps advance the focus on culture in service delivery and presents an opportunity for internal service providers and employees to co-create value.
Our blog series on
service management use cases beyond IT offers in-depth reviews of recommendations and successful implementations from departments like
Facilities and
Human Resources. These stories have helped contextualize the value of expanding your service desk investment to encompass multiple service providers. This may be the final post for this series, but there are so many opportunities for other departments to get involved in the service desk. (Literally
hundreds of them.)
Guided Stretches for Other Departments in the Service Desk
Each department’s operations impact broader organizational strategies and goals. Eliminating disparate systems and narrowing support tools to one ITSM platform can be advantageous for the organization, encouraging cross-functional collaboration to fuel long-term business objectives and success.
Let’s review some of the departments we don’t view as “traditional” service providers but could find value in commingling within one service desk.
Legal
A technology company’s
SolarWinds Service Desk implementation was initiated by IT for basic incident management. Shortly after going live with ticketing, IT expanded their adoption of the platform to track their assets and manage service requests. When designing the
service catalog and publishing these requests to their employee service portal, they garnered interest from their Legal department.
The Legal team was inundated with requests across the business: catering to Sales for new customers, Marketing to verify acceptable verbiage, Human Resources for workers’ contracts, and more. As the organization was so reliant on Legal, the team needed a platform to elevate their request intake, automate ticket routing, and foster more self-service. Departing from their homegrown solution, plagued with manual processes, Legal was able to leverage their organization’s existing service desk to achieve their service management initiatives. The blanket legal request form was split into separate service requests, paving the way for more granular
reporting.
This segmentation enabled the team to define categories, ranging from redlines to requests for proposals, while streamlining incident triage and routing. As Legal partnered with IT to expand their service desk investment, employees are now able to find resources and get support, in one place, from two critical departments in their organization.
Finance
Different from other implementations, a hospitality group’s Finance department led the selection and configuration of SolarWinds Service Desk. Prior to choosing SolarWinds, Finance was using email and spreadsheets to address their service management needs. With spreadsheets as their only source of truth, the team found gaps in their service tracking and fulfilment, which led to confusion and duplicate efforts.
Finance realized an ITSM platform would help to alleviate these challenges, elevate visibility, and heighten access to key support resources for both their technicians and employees. A major focus of their
implementation was configuring custom roles. The ability to scope access rights for their users was key, as the responsibilities and data access for Finance’s technicians differed based on their various requests.
Refining their categories eliminated confusion around request types, which in turn streamlined how incidents were routed and incited the creation of valuable knowledge base articles. After Finance went live with the service desk, they helped implement several cross-functional processes with IT and Human Resources, which further establish SolarWinds as their single service management platform.
Marketing
The Marketing department facilitates many unique requests—from events and campaigns to the creation of business cards—that impact different factions of a business. A biotech organization’s Marketing team needed a system to help them manage their incoming requests. They also wanted a forum to publish available services to reduce the volume of email inquiries. The team found they were able to centralize their offerings and improve their services with SolarWinds Service Desk.
To optimize their time, the team crafted a strategic plan for their
ITSM evaluation and implementation. Ultimately, they sought to reduce users’ reliance on email, eliminate walk-up requests, improve response and fulfillment times, and streamline their service request processes. To achieve these goals, they identified stakeholders and future administrators to ensure these core users were empowered to configure the platform to meet both current and future needs.
With clear objectives and defined champions, Marketing implemented and published a diverse service catalog on the
service portal. This created operational efficiencies within the department, helping them standardize request intake forms while improving how they communicated fulfillment timelines and expectations to their employees. Following their successful implementation, Marketing partnered with IT, Human Resources, and Facilities to help establish cross-departmental adoption in the service desk.
All-Access Membership in One ITSM Solution
A gym membership gives users the flexibility to design self-paced workouts from a variety of equipment or use the available trainers for support. Removing the complexity of access and centralizing all departments' resources in the service desk, can offer similar benefits to the business.
To solidify the service desk's presence within your organization, develop a plan to help strengthen your business case. As you plant the seed for opportunity, share stories of success supported by data to paint the value to department stakeholders. Help other
internal service providers assess their current operations so they can contextualize how the service desk can aid in maintaining existing processes, improve visibility, and
alleviate pains. Leveraging your expertise can guide future conversations, amplify cross-departmental collaboration, and lead to a shared vision for long-term success in one ITSM solution.
