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Moving IT Service Management to the 21st century

By molje04 posted Feb 17, 2016 06:18 PM

  

In the last 15 years we’ve seen the explosion of the global Internet, the proliferation of mobile devices and the subsequent emergence of the app economy. Everything has changed. Except ITSM. darwincampaign.jpgToday’s business user simply has to fill out a help desk ticket to re-live the technologies of the late 80s.

 

The ITSM experience doesn’t reflect the technology experience today’s users are accustomed to, so IT is perceived as doing things the old-fashioned way. For an industry that claims its purpose is to uniquely transform services, the technology seems hopelessly static.

 

Think of today’s GPS systems as an example: Providers don’t simply digitize a paper map and put it on a screen. They add significantly more value by detecting your current location, helping to find the most direct, traffic-free route to your destination and then talking you through the process of getting there. The technology has an innate human focus.

 

Current ITSM products are designed for processes, not people

It seemed like a good time to step back and evaluate the ability of today’s ITSM to solve human problems. CA Technologies conducted a deep, labor intensive study involving ethnographic research to get a full picture of the current state of ITSM. We didn’t want to conduct a study limited to our own product line and customers, or to taint it with any preconceived ideas, so we took the necessary steps to give us an honest, state-of-the-industry perspective. And we got one.

 

Already aware that ITSM had some deficiencies, we didn’t expect perfection. But we were surprised at the extent of some of the issues.

 

The bottom line? ITSM products today aren’t built to help people solve problems. In fact, they’re not designed for people at all. They’re designed for and built around IT processes.

 

Users are running away from IT self-service

Today’s ITSM tools don’t begin to compare with the innovation in consumer technologies. As a result, IT analysts frequently resort to working outside the system.

 

The key issues cited? Managing too much data from too many knowledge sources across multiple systems. Difficulties in prioritizing excessive numbers of tickets. And service level agreements meant to ensure speedy resolutions are actually promoting bad analyst behaviors instead.

 

We also found that business users take every possible step to avoid IT self-service solutions. They have trouble locating them deep inside the corporate intranet, and when they do, they find them confusing, laborious and loaded with difficult-to-understand IT jargon.

 

Building a solution that embraces the team, not the ticket

With a detailed, research-based understanding of how we can revitalize IT Service Management, we’ve set out to create a new, improved solution designed for humans and built for service.

 

We’re working on new features, realigning functionality and incorporating entirely new algorithms not common in the ITSM market. We’re reengineering the IP in ways that will help analysts to deliver top-notch service management.

 

An ITSM solution that embraces the team rather than the ticket will support business growth, provide better customer service and user experience, improve workforce productivity and manage costs. A new approach rooted in customer research will help to modernize and reinvigorate the entire ITSM market.

 

We’re excited about the future of ITSM at CA. And we’ve created a white paper that outlines some of the initial findings of our study as well as a vision for how ITSM should work in the app economy. We invite you to download it here.

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