However, choosing the right one that's best for your organization becomes easier if you define your strategy, understand your IT infrastructure and its needs, and have an eye toward how IT is evolving in your company.
To make this a lot easier for you, here are a few tips on improving your organization's IT service management:
Establish your IT service management strategy
This is one of the most crucial steps you have to consider if you're looking to optimize your ITSM. Do this and the other steps in ITSM will fall into place more easily.
Identify what features of ITSM your organization needs. There are organizations and businesses that need a help desk for when their employees or clients encounter problems with hardware, software, or the network—does this sound like you? Or maybe you need a system for managing each and every IT asset belonging to your organization?
Keeping an eye on your IT assets from the time they are ordered until they reach the end of their life cycle stops wasted money and ensures you get the most value from all your IT infrastructure.
Think about how your ITSM tool can add business value to your organization. Maybe it’s through mobility, or perhaps, a network upgrade is in order. What you need to remember is that it's important to define your own unique strategy.
Take advantage of the latest technological innovations
There is so much more than going out and adopting the latest technology out there. What you might have not known is that there's plenty of room for putting technology to work to solve your ITSM issues.
Innovations such as cloud hosting, mobile-friendliness, and methods for providing feedback can help your ITSM team to integrate and utilize technology to their best advantage.
You might want to consider making simple ITSM solutions (like resetting passwords) self-service processes so your IT team can focus on more complex issues. Establishing FAQs on the company network and sending out important IT announcements over the company social networks are other good ITSM technology uses as well.
Build an ever-evolving ITSM knowledge base
When any of your team learns how to solve a problem that has never occurred before, or when an employee finds a better way to solve a common tech issue, documenting these solutions in an ITSM knowledge base prevents duplication of effort the next time the same issue arises.
Instead of trying to come up with a solution from scratch, a member of your IT team can simply look up the problem in a searchable knowledge base to check if anyone has successfully resolved it before. If so, then far less time will be wasted in figuring it out all over again.
You can even make the knowledge base available to your clients or end-users, in case some of them are interested or prefer to solve their own minor IT problems.
Track your ITSM software's progress and adjust as necessary
Every IT service management process should be tracked and reassessed from time to time. This would be essential, especially if you have resources you might have already forgotten or not aware exists.
For example, maybe you already have an excellent FAQ section on your company network, but nobody knows about it. Perhaps your IT team has already saved a certain amount of money due to the effective management of IT assets.
Simply put, tracking IT service management is crucial to determine what you’re doing well, where improvement and opportunities are possible, and for making the case and determining the ITSM budget every year.
Keep in mind that ITSM is never “done", even if there may be times of relative stability. As IT and technology continue their rapid evolution, your IT service management will have to do the same to make the most of your company's IT investment.
Remember that ITSM software tools are not one-size-fits-all solutions
IT service management is not a one-size-fits-all proposition as no two organizations are alike.
While it's perfectly okay to take into consideration how other organizations' ITSM works, your own ITSM solution must be tailored to your own company's needs. Because if you're only after what you think is a great ITSM tool for a certain company, you'll be risking spending time on unnecessary processes and services, or overlooking the real needs of your own employees and even clients.
Create an ITSM strategy first, then assess your organization's needs, implement processes, and monitor them to learn how effective they are. Consider continuous improvement as one of your long-term goals.
Closing Words
In conclusion, an effective ITSM is all about having a strategy for designing, delivering, and managing information technology, in whatever form it takes. After all, if technology doesn’t help your company meet its business goals, then why are you using it? Consider the tips mentioned above and create a support loop that benefits the entire company.
