Building a business case for Intelligent Service Management
Traditional IT service management solutions often fall short when it comes to innovation. While legacy systems are tailor-made to perform one or two functions well today’s service management solutions need to perform beyond these boundaries. Especially, since the pandemic has just ushered in a new era of service management, one that is filled with new challenges.
Combating these challenges calls for a different approach—one that addresses unpredictability. Deploying Artificial Intelligence can augment the capabilities of existing resources, enabling them to perform more efficiently. A recent IDG study found 93% of IT professionals have already deployed or started to explore AI to augment their ITSM and ITOM modernization efforts. Clearly, intelligent service management furthers digital transformation goals across many enterprises. If you haven’t already considered modernizing ITSM and ITOM here are 4 compelling reasons why you should:
Delivering value
Although several reasons could drive your decision to modernize your IT services and operations, one factor stands out—creating value for your end-users.
Every investment in IT should amplify the benefits for your end-users. Investing in intelligent service management solutions will most definitely fetch better ROI provided you track the right metrics. For example, you will see measurable improvements in key service management metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), retention, employee experience, and self-service right from the get-go.
Modernizing your service management solution involves multiple stakeholders like IT, strategy, operations, HR, finance, etc. Though complex at first, bringing these different teams together helps you create a shared frame of reference. Linking a transformative technology like AI with everyday awareness of the business goals, will help engage the stakeholders better and encourage new ones to join the effort.
Adopting an intelligent service management platform can go a long way in delivering better experiences, higher service quality, and operating efficiencies.
Enhanced employee experience
A new generation has arrived.
As Gen-Z enters the workforce, employers’ focus should shift towards understanding their behavior and figuring out their needs at the modern workplace. This is a generation driven by self-service preferences. To meet the needs and retain the best minds of this generation, organizations should focus more on creating excellent employee experiences.
With AI-powered service management solutions, organizations can now create consumer-grade experiences for their users when they request services. Employees seeking new gadgets or access to applications can now feel like shopping on Amazon. Employee onboarding processes, which are otherwise manually intensive and difficult to orchestrate in a fully remote environment, can now be streamlined with the help of intelligent automation workflows.
Reduced operational overhead
The post-pandemic world brings with it a myriad of new challenges for IT service management. Companies adopt a remote-first approach to capitalize on more diverse and world-class talent spread across different geographies and time zones. Due to this shift, the need for round-the-clock support becomes inevitable, thus making IT operators excessively burdened by tactical processes.
By infusing intelligence into your service management tool, you can change how you deliver IT services. Chatbots in self-service portals use natural language processing (NLP) to detect specific keywords, process these requests, and provide the right services. They can also help triage all incoming tickets and route them to the appropriate teams for faster resolution times.
AI-enabled service management tools can automatically fulfill mundane service requests, freeing agent time for innovation and high-value activities. In the long run, deploying such intelligent automation workflows can also help IT organizations scale quickly and more efficiently without the need for excessive hiring.
Better business insights
One of the pivotal factors for introducing intelligence into your service management practices is to gain better insights. Day-to-day operations can get hectic with modern IT estates spreading across different geographical locations. In a cluttered environment like this, sifting through massive data lakes stored in the cloud and retrieving the correct information requires powerful database analysis tools.
AI-powered service management tools can analyze these large amounts of data and churn out actionable insights. These can be leveraged to make well-informed, critical business decisions using machine learning (ML) techniques. These tools allow you to perform root cause analyses and topic clustering to identify issues grouped by similar causes. This helps you find the actual cause of problems and suggest a more efficient resolution through a knowledge base article or even operations change.
Modernizing your services and operations management using AI also allows you to visualize data better. For example, analyzing unstructured support portal data can enable IT teams to quickly understand what applications cause the most trouble to their users. This allows IT leaders to visualize user sentiments, shift from reactive to proactive problem management, and improve service delivery.
Your business goals are an effective tool for strategic success in modernizing your IT services and operations management. Critical issues throughout this process are not limited to just technology; it’s about the people and the culture as well. There are many ways you can be aided through this transformative journey. The Frost & Sullivan whitepaper is particularly recommended. With a collation of inputs from several industry experts,t details four guiding principles that any organization can leverage to modernize its IT service and operations management. This newly released whitepaper throws light on infusing intelligence into your service management solutions and how to get started with the journey of modernizing your tech stack. Click here to read more.
