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Don't Let Your ITSM Platform Drain IT Budget and Resources
(SPONSORED CONTENT) Complex, hard-to-use IT service management platforms can cost you valuable time, resources, and money. Consider these five questions when evaluating IT service management vendors.
December 2, 2021
4 Min Read
(SPONSORED CONTENT) If you have experience in running an IT service desk, you know that minor issues and anomalies in IT services and operations can easily become a bottleneck. What may not be as obvious, however, is the ITSM platform itself can become a drain. When evaluating the supporting technology, consider if it’s requiring too much administration time; if it’s not operating optimally due to additional development and programming needs; if it offers end-users a viable self-service option; and if it can combine all work to one place -- tickets, problems, change requests and project work.
Without the right IT service management technology to support the team, manual processing, redundant data entry and poor access to information can bog down your resources, cause unnecessary waits for those needing help and cause strategic initiatives to be forgotten.
5 Areas to Examine for ITSM Platform Effectiveness
Does it combine ITSM and project management together? Often, technicians are assigned to both tickets and project work -- having these managed in different systems can be problematic. There’s never a single view of all work, and managers can’t appropriately manage resources causing technicians to be over or under-allocated.
Is the service portal WCAG 2.0 AA compliant? Ensuring accessibility is important and often legally required. Increased web accessibility helps better service end-users, and failure to comply can lead to lawsuits or other legal implications. With out-of-the-box compliance, you should look for hidden costs that can be charged if the portal requires updates each time the system is updated. It’s important to ask questions about how accessibility is deployed and how it’s managed during updates.
Does it manage the full ITIL framework? IT service management encompasses a spectrum of functions -- from ticketing and incident/problem management to asset discovery and change management – it’s important that all these functions operate together. Being able to embed the ITIL framework with workflow and automation is also important -- whether you are just starting to explore this or already invested, you need to be sure that you can grow into the framework over time.
Look at total cost of ownership/administration of the platform: What does it really take to run an ITSM platform? Take a close look at how it’s configured -- will it require coding or scripting? What does it take to administer? What if another department outside of IT wants to use it, like Human Resources? How easy is it to spin up another service request application for HR? Can they create their own workflows and configuration, or will that take more IT resources?
Can it be leveraged across the enterprise? Service management is no longer not just for IT -- it’s now leveraged in human resources, procurement, facilities, marketing and more. It’s important to have flexibility so you can either deploy one platform across the enterprise with one portal, or sites for different departments. With the right tool, you can maintain one enterprise service platform and still give a unique landing page to each group, while funneling all requests to one platform. Leverage iPaaS for integration to other systems for quick action such as HRIS, CRM or others.
How Covenant Improved Productivity & Outcomes
At Covenant Healthcare they needed a better way to manage tickets and projects in IT as the needs of employees, doctors, nurses and patients continued to evolve and grow.
Frank Fear, CIO at Covenant, recognized a change was needed as the tech expectations within healthcare started to shift. “Our patients expect technology. They expect certain things like virtual visits and to be able to schedule an appointment online.”
And it’s not just the patients who expect technology.
“In healthcare, they need quick, fast access to a large amount of sophisticated data,” explained Raymond Hall, Technology Manager at Covenant Health. They’re asking to see a patient’s chart and an x-ray and all of this information, and they want to be able to get to that workstation and see it all there.”
“I have my own CIO dashboard and in one look I can see any negative survey that’s come in the last 24 hours, then pivot over and look at any project that has a status of red that needs my attention, then pivot over and look at what’s going live in the next 30 days, then pivot over and see what critical tickets have come in that maybe affect our entire organization,” Fear said. “That’s the wow. It’s the pieces coming together in a single pane for me, as a leader, to be able to manage and support our organization.”
Another “wow” for Fear? They don’t need a dedicated full-time employee to manage and maintain the TeamDynamix platform. “We felt TeamDynamix had all of the advanced functionality other products had but it didn’t require the need for a full FTE to manage and support it.”
Andrew Graf is the Chief Product Strategist for TeamDynamix. His passion lies in helping organizations thrive in an ever-changing environment. As a co-founder of TeamDynamix, Andrew is well versed in the common issues facing IT leaders -- as the need for increased IT maturity rises, he is able to help map out a way forward.
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