Driving the new IT mandate: Inside global organizations driving digital transformation
Businesses today operate in a highly dynamic environment. And it’s safe to say that over the last couple of years IT departments have witnessed an unprecedented change. While digital transformations have been among the key initiatives for most organizations, covid 19 catapulted enterprise digital transformation to become the top priority for many businesses.
With this shift, the IT department has taken center stage. The role of IT as we know it is changing and moving from a support function to a business enabler. CEOs not only trust technology leaders to be strategic business partners but also to drive organizational change with technology-driven initiatives.
(Bonus: From analyst insights to customer stories to tech collaborations, go deep with our experts and discover how to transform IT into an unstoppable force.)
We met with three IT leaders from three different industries: professional services, healthcare, and retail, and asked them questions ranging from business expectations to key challenges affecting their business to the evolution of employee experience.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into how tech leaders are working on going through some of the most challenging IT transformation initiatives and what they are doing to align IT priorities to the larger business mandate. You will also learn how they deliver to business expectations, provide uninterrupted IT services, and deliver a delightful employee experience.
Continue reading to get a first-hand account of what it takes to drive change and lead the IT function in today’s increasingly digital world.
1. Inclusion is key
At CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), to be unstoppable means to be free and not tied down to a single location. The onset of the global pandemic shifted the company’s focus to keeping the systems up and running and ensuring the staff had everything they needed to carry out their jobs regardless of where they were. Inclusion and availability of resources to every last employee were their top priorities.
Deploying scalable technologies that aligned with their business needs, providing quality laptops and hardware, moving away from traditional approaches, and educating their employees about the new changes in the workplace were some of the key initiatives to ensure the workplace was a much better space technologically to give the staff what they needed.
The Freshservice automation functionalities, hardware service requests, and employee onboarding features were some of the key contributors to channeling the new IT mandate at CIPD.
2. Delivering always-on service
At The Princess Alexandra Hospital (NHS), delivering the best patient care means spending less time doing administrative work on the system and more time attending to the patient. The COVID 19 pandemic accelerated the organization’s move to be more agile and more reliant on AI and automation for delivering always-on services and supporting business priorities.
One of their biggest wins from adopting an agile IT service was shifting from the call-center kind of a help desk approach to a more centralized and resilient way of getting things done quickly. The Freshservice self-service portal and knowledge base functionalities helped the trust cut down a massive amount of time spent retrieving patient records, resetting passwords, and ordering medical equipment.
3. Ensuring uninterrupted IT, especially, in challenging times.
Benson for Beds, UK’s leading bed specialist, had its goal set to define the business transformation plan, grow the business in terms of turnover, and give an omnichannel experience to its end-users. And IT was involved in every one of these strategic moves to channel uninterrupted IT services to drive the new IT mandate of always-on IT.
Bensons for Beds has seen a massive improvement in the user experience for both agents and end-users after implementing Freshservice. The user portal has allowed the end-users to raise different types of requests in one place as well as provide complete visibility on the status of their requests. The robust ticketing workflow has significantly improved the SLA levels at Bensons for Beds. The average ticket resolution time has been enhanced by 54%, and FCR increased from 86% to 95%.
Final Thoughts
The IT function is not just about tackling the challenges of today but it is also about positioning to support business strategies for the future. And we can all agree that IT has moved out of the server room and the focus has shifted from delivering projects to delivering value.
