What is ITSM anyway?
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) refers to the strategic approach that governs the policies, programs, projects, tasks, and activities associated with Information Technology (IT). An ITSM Modernization Plan is usually included as part of an organization’s IT Strategic Plan, which is generally developed by an organization’s IT Department and is aligned to realize the strategic business objectives of the organization. It typically includes key priorities for modernizing systems and implementation of digital transformations. A successful IT strategic plan provides a roadmap of enterprise-wide IT activities across all departments of the organization, its customers, its partners, and other key stakeholders.
While your organization may already have a robust ITSM Modernization plan in place, it may be worth exploring how advances in technology may be used to enhance it. If your organization’s plan does not include a focus on interdepartmental collaboration or include the people involved in the enterprise’s IT process (e.g., partners, suppliers), there may be a good chance your organization's plans could use an update. If that is the case, or if your organization has an interest in pursuing digital transformation solutions, here are some critical questions to consider going over before implementing your plan.
1 - Who Will You Choose as Your Implementation Partner?
Implementing your ITSM Modernization plan is a big deal, and it can consume valuable resources. If not reviewed strategically, it can cost the organization more than it benefits.
A key success factor in executing any IT modernization is choosing an experienced implementation partner that can guide you and your organization through the planning, implementation, and deployment processes. An experienced implementation partner will help you mitigate risks and identify opportunities to optimize your plan. Organizations are finding that some of the best implementations are the ones that involve the migration of costly on-premise resources to the cloud, provide a strategic advantage, streamline processes, provide higher levels of visibility to management and are implemented with an agile framework using the latest IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions.
Once an implementation partner is chosen, most of the hard work is done. The next step is addressing the following questions.
2 - How Does Your Organization Do Change Management?
Whether it’s personal, professional, or organizational goals, one truth remains constant - some of the most valuable recommendations for change come from inside an organization. An organization’s ability to adapt and change to a continually shifting landscape, and to do it well, is a key characteristic of a successful company. Change in an organization occurs not only at the strategic level but also at the operational and tactical levels. Giving a voice to those who manage daily operations within the company can help bring about the most practical and implementable solutions.
Another key success factor is to engage with a partner that understands how the impact of a technology change can affect your organization; a seasoned implementation partner understands the importance of communications management in managing technology adoption. The impact of technology adoption could include managing changes to organizational processes, defining new job descriptions for employee roles and responsibilities and providing users with time to adapt to and engage with new processes. To increase the probability of success during implementation, it is vital to find an implementation partner that has successfully enabled other organizations that have deployed similar solutions for an organization like yours.
3 - Is Your ITSM Modernization Partner Collaborative, or Are They Trying to Make You Fit Their Template?
Here at CoreSphere, our philosophy is to tailor our implementations to the unique requirements of our customers, since no two customers have the same needs. As a seasoned implementation partner, we feel this dynamic is essential to consider when choosing your partner.
There are circumstances in which implementation partners may try to fit your organization into their standard implementation template. It may be under the guise of best practices, or it may simply be related to their standard method of implementation. While there may be growing pains for your organization when implementing modern best practices or compliance requirements, an implementation partner should act as your best practices and compliance Subject Matter Expert.
Your partner should collaborate with the leadership and stakeholders of your organization to understand how to align the implementation solution with the plans, mission, objectives of your organization. With this in-depth understanding, your implementation partner should then work with your team to implement tailored solutions that benefit your organization’s needs and align with best practices. An implementation partner that fails to take the time to understand your organization could end up costing unnecessary time, money, and resources even before their solution goes live. If you find that, after choosing your implementation partner, you feel that you’re being put into a standard template, it may benefit you to reconsider the partnership.
4 - Is Your ITSM Strategic Plan Scalable?
Your organization’s ITSM plan may currently be aligned with your current organization’s mission and objectives, but, if left unchanged, it won’t align with your organization’s goals in 2, 5 or even 10 years.
A key success factor in executing a successful ITSM Modernization plan is to ensure that the plan and the implementations are updated when key business drivers (e.g., mission, objectives, compliance, security, etc.) change or when your organization grows. It is best to protect your investment by continuing to enhance the depth and breadth of your solution. By choosing the ServiceNow platform, you can be confident that your solution will scale with your organization’s mission and objective. ServiceNow is continuously enhancing its solutions so you don’t have to. Scalability of your ITSM solution is essential to preserving your organization’s investment in the solution.
An enterprise-wide service management solution using ServiceNow ITSM can integrate easily with other systems and enable additional capabilities such as:
IT Operations Management (e.g., Discovery, Service Mapping)
Business Management (e.g., Facilities Service Management, Project Portfolio Management)
Human Resource Service Delivery (e.g., employee on-boarding)
Governance Risk and Compliance
IT Security Operations (e.g., security incident response)
Adapting a system that integrates seamlessly with an enterprise-wide solution will enable your organization to scale effortlessly when compared with a “best-of-breed” solution.
ITSM with ServiceNow and CoreSphere
ServiceNow is developed using its very own Now Platform. The Now Platform is a suite of PaaS solutions that are designed to provide any organization an intelligent and intuitive cloud platform that delivers both Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions as well as the ability to build custom solutions on its platform. ServiceNow uses The Now Platform to offer suites of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications – one of them is ServiceNow ITSM. ServiceNow is highly customizable and highly scalable and can be used to support the needs of enterprise users wanting an on-premise solution or hosted on ServiceNow’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Partnering with CoreSphere to lead your ServiceNow ITSM implementation or support your existing ServiceNow ITSM solution will be a positive step in helping your organization realize your plans for today and build a foundation for future growth. Our strategy focuses on implementing your ITSM solution for all your stakeholders - from your employees, your help desk agents, your managers, your partners, and your external constituents. By working closely with the members of your team, we can address both the technology change and its impact on the processes and people of your organization to maximize success.
CoreSphere’s implementation philosophy is to advise on best practices for using technology as part of the implementation of your organization’s plans. Our team brings ITIL-based industry best practices and processes aligned with ServiceNow ITSM solution to help your organization increase the maturity of processes and streamline operations. Combined with our agile scrum implementation approach, and incremental sprint development approach, we help organizations incrementally realize the benefits of your IT investment quicker than using a more traditional waterfall approach.
Contact CoreSphere today to find out more about how we can help your team realize your plans by implementing ServiceNow to achieve a scalable solution that “consummerizes” the user experience and enables your organization to scale into the future.
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