Service Management is a different way of looking at your IT operations. It helps the IT department to run more like an actual department, i.e. part of your business, and not some "black box" entity that no one understands.
Essentially, Service Management makes IT easy, and the right technology makes Service Management easy.
Once you understand what you have, you need to determine how well it works. For each IT item that you have, you should establish some way to indicate how well it works. And for that, you need to ask lots of questions. How many times did this specific computer break this year? Why? How did the IT person resolve the issue? Was it done quickly and efficiently? Was it caused by a bad patch, or was it something that someone did, inadvertently or deliberatly? What changed, who changed it? If the computer broke more than 3 times, could there be a bigger problem? Does the computer need to be replaced because the model that was purchased is not reliable? Or is it because its users are not well equipped or trained to properly use it? How happy or satisfied your employees are with your IT? How about your customers - are they satisfied with what your IT does for them?
These are just some of the questions you really need to ask. Obviously, these questions demand answers. These answers must be measurable and trackable, in terms of varying metrics and Key Performance Indicators. Having the right technology in place will provide the answers and help you obtain the necessary metrics and indicators which will give you the insight into operations.
Having answers to questions described above will allow you to evaluate how well your IT is doing. Once you have an established set of up to date metrics, you can evaluate how well your IT is doing, and where it is going. Are things improving? Are they getting worse? Are there additional questions that need to be asked, and additional metrics created?
This process must be continuous. You will want to review how well you're doing regularly. You'll want to see charts that show reduction in number of issues and downtime, and graphs that show increased customer satisfaction. And if the data shows a reduction in customer satisfaction and increases in the number of problems, you'd want to know why. You'd want to be alerted, and you'd want the people responsible for that specific metric to be alerted and take action.
Having the right configuration data and metrics provides you and your IT team with knowledge of what has occurred before. If a specific system ran out of resources in the past, and is having issues again, the first thing that should be checked is whether it is out of resources. This can allow for a faster resolution of an issue.
Having this information in place also gives you a great opportunity to improve stability of your IT environment. You can find poorly performing systems, error-prone applications, lack of training or expertise in support staff, faulty parts, inefficiently used or underused equipment, and much, much more.
Reviewing metrics and data would indicate what needs to be done next in order to prevent issues in your IT environment. Replacing a bad part, adding additional memory where needed, providing additional training when required, upgrading an application or a driver to a newer, less buggy version - these and other remediation steps can help you significantly reduce the number of problems that occur in IT.
Most of issues occur in IT because of change. Managing change properly can significantly reduce the number of future problems. If you know that a specific change causes significant impact to multiple other components, you can identify a process that would reduce or even eliminate impact.
If you don't understand what is happening now, you can't prepare for the future. That is a rule applicable to many aspects, and it can definitely be applied in IT. Preparing for the future - whether it is an expansion of operations or just keeping things steady - requires understanding of how things work today. With respect to IT, it may be as simple as not having to buy an additional PC for a new employee because there are three computers sitting in a closet that everyone forgot about. Or not having to purchase a new software application because one of your employees is no longer using the same application so it can be moved. Or determining whether you need to obtain an additional server to run this additional component or an application, or understanding that you can run another application on an existing server, because all it is doing is just sitting there idle 360 days of the year.
Having this understanding, being able to determine what you already have, what you can re-use or add to can significantly reduce your costs during changes in your organization or business. It will give you additional data to make better decisions and to be prepared.
Having the appropriate Service Management technology that is wisely implemented and properly utilized is essential to all of the above and much more. Review some of our Completed Projects to see how we've helped our customers improve IT operations and read more about our services below.