How Smart CIOs Use AI Service Desks for Change Management

According to Gartner, 74% of employees support organizational change. Unfortunately, this rate dropped as employees are unlikely to adjust to change-related fatigue. However, organizations can improve change management initiatives with a more human approach.

As change is inevitable and a catalyst for growth and success for organizations, CIOs aim to take change management initiatives as and when needed.

Given change management is challenging, AI Service Desks can be a powerful tool for CIOs to implement effective change management initiatives.

This article teaches how AI service desks can help humanize change management initiatives for CIOs.

IT infrastructure is a backbone for any organization to maintain its operations and gain a competitive advantage.

However, the tech process evolves and needs updates or changes.

As a definition of change management, following processes to effectively maintain change by adhering to trends in the technology space or changing an old or existing technology process in a business IT infrastructure is known as change management or IT change management.

For example, your organization has used a business-specific communication channel for internal communications for many years.

Now, you want to migrate to a more robust SaaS-based cloud platform for bandwidth, flexibility, and intuitiveness.

Cloud migration might take time and cause your team members to face challenges until the change occurs successfully. Change management aims to help the change happen frictionlessly while keeping members productive and efficient.

Digital transformation is essential for teams to work efficiently and provide services at scale.However, legacy systems or inefficient technologies or tools can impact employee’s ability to perform better.

IT change management is essential to expedite growth or improve a team’s efficiency or productivity.

Another critical need for IT change management is an organization can ensure a competitive edge and set an example that they are the pioneer of new technologies or changes, helping you win employee trust, keep them engaged and loyal, and build long-term employee advocacy.

On the other way, if you consider IT change management as only nice to have, you tend to lose to competition and expect employee turnover.

Here’s a roundup of why IT change management is critical,

• Teams are productive : With the change to your IT infrastructure or any business processes, teams can leverage new ways of working to boost efficiency and productivity.

• User experience is twice as high : Teams can work at scale using new tools and features, removing bottlenecks that hinder their ability to work faster and effectively. Users become more engaged and loyal.

• Compliance with workers’ well-being : Effective change management ensures organizations comply with employee wellness needs by making necessary tools available or providing mediums that promote a healthy workplace.

• Cost reduction : Change management ensures employees stay happy and engaged, thus improving their intent to stay longer with the organizations and reducing costs to replenish new hires.

• Continuous improvement : Change management keeps organizations competitive by letting them utilize new processes or technologies. As a result, businesses gain a positive outlook, streamline their processes that augment existing business functions, and help reap benefits.

• More happy customers : With employees gaining twice as much productivity and efficiency, they can perform better and produce customer service. Change management allows IT leaders to build more happy customers and brand loyalty.

Any change that needs an implementation needs an effective tool to build end-to-end process monitoring.

While AI service desks are critical to facilitating change management, they are a significant tool for CIOs to look at what needs change.If you already have a service desk platform, you can leverage service desk analytics to reveal which business processes or assets need change.

Given a service desk platform receives requests for many indecent types, CIOs can determine change needs based on changes

• Standard change : a change based on preauthorised processes built within the service desk to manage downtime is a standard change. Also, standard change is a common issue an organization tends to fix.

• Major change : anything that can impact service delivery and trigger business disruption for an unexpected time can be defined as a major change. Also note that a major change happens without any planned iteration processes. For example, a server disruption can be defined as a major change that takes time to fix.

• Emergency change : Implementing change on an emergency basis is known as an emergency change in the service desk. For example, installing a new software suite to an app is an emergency change.

Now, service desk analytics are crucial to determining the frequency of incidents and checking if any service or process needs change.

There is a specific factor to recognize how an incident eventually translates into a change. Service desk analytics can help you determine the necessity of change.

Change management revolves around a lifecycle comprising an incident, a problem, and change.

Incident : If you have a disruption to your project management tool, and when you raise a service request, it is an incident.

Problem : The same project management tool disruption issue continues indefinitely for others and can be defined as a problem.

Change : Post diagnosis, if your service desk team finds that the project management tool needs patching to resolve the issue is change management.

Based on the incident lifecycle or how an incident gradually evolves to become a severe change issue, you can prefer to implement change management for productivity and efficiency.

Smart CIOs can further use service desk predictive analytics capabilities to assess their progress on their projected plan.

• Monitoring and incident management

The service desk uses AI/ML predictive analytics to trigger an alert when something unexpected happens. This is usually an everyday task a service desk performs to alert an incident. If anything occurs after implementing a change, smart alerting or notifications help you take steps and reduce impact.

• Feedback and continuous improvement

CIOs are at ease as they collect feedback post-implementation of change management. A service desk platform improves stakeholder coordination and communications to gain expert insights and implement feedback-based improvement.

With any change comes a lot of hurdles. Change triggers chaos, disagreement, and confusion for stakeholders, including internal users. A self-service portal comes in handy in reducing chaos by allowing you to communicate change properly and educate your people to adjust to change seamlessly.

Dispatch knowledge articles through documentation on self-service.

A self-service portal embedded in the service desk platform or integrated within business communications channels gives access to change-related knowledge articles.Users become aware of changes and enable themselves to adjust to them.

Manage change effectively with post-review documents.

Instead of waiting for leaders in charge or managers for an update on the change implementation, a self-service portal can quickly enable a stakeholder to gain the current status or review documents.Change happens frictionlessly as updates are available on an easy-to-access self-service portal.

Change management implementation requires end-to-end monitoring for the successful completion of the initiative. But, hurdles are significant if you have a legacy system for change management.

• Inadequate communications : Managing change manually or with a conventional system might lead you to get caught up with communication challenges. Communication silos cause delays and chaos.

• Employee disengagement : Change is always challenging for employees to adopt at scale. Legacy systems add more hurdles as teams need help to fetch updates continuously.

• Insufficient knowledge and resources : Conventional systems have information too old to be deemed fit for use. They are rarely updated. For users and stakeholders, it is similar to finding a need in the haystack when it comes to finding a particular knowledge article.

• Lack of visibility : With a traditional approach, change management has fewer end-to-end visibility options for stakeholders, preventing them from getting the latest updates on the project initiative.

Compared to legacy systems, AI service desks bring significant benefits for CIOs in implementing change management.

As a CIO, if you get away from challenges elevated by legacy systems, you can consider AI service desks.

Here are the benefits of the AI service desk.

• Users stay in the know.

Unlike traditional systems that restrict knowledge discovery about change management, AI service desks ensure users get change-related articles at ease and are updated. Instant access to information helps them adapt to change-related processes and drive project efficiency.

• Employees use self-service at large.

This is good for any change management to expect full user support. AI service desk allows them to use self-service and get information autonomously to reduce the volume of support tickets. Service desks can focus on change management initiatives and aid in faster implementation.

• Drive seamless change management.

With everyone accessing change management documentation or knowledge articles, internal users and other stakeholders know what’s happening and what they can expect post-change. As they anticipate a change atmosphere, companies are prepared to avoid confusion and disagreement while driving seamless change management.

Regardless of your service desk platform, Workativ —conversational AI platform allows you to build a chatbot for ITSM or service desk platform.

Interestingly, Workativ also brings the power of large language models or Generative AI capabilities. Known as Knowledge AI, embedded in the Workativ conversational AI, it helps you customize workflows with appropriate knowledge articles and enables you to provide consolidated information to accelerate knowledge discovery and help you perform tasks for service desks.

With Workativ as your service desk chatbot, you can use it to create business-specific workflow automation for your change management needs.

What Workativ offers best is that it satiates CIOs' change management requirements by enabling them to build end-to-end visibility across every touchpoint.

So, you can connect with your stakeholders, communicate your change management needs, make internal users aware of the upcoming change, and seamlessly implement change.

Workativ best complements the AI service desk’s components with powerful modules such as Knowledge AI engine, AI/ML engine, conversational AI capability, etc., to implement effective change management.

If you eagerly want to overcome change-related challenges, Workativ can help you.

To learn more, schedule a demo today.