Why do you need ITSM in
your Digital Trasformation?

Reminiscing the COVID-19 phase is visualizing those dire attempts to keep businesses running. The traditional approach to serving customers fell short of business expectations, which abruptly pushed for a paradigm shift in the existing operating model towards a more digitized strategy.

Businesses soon embraced cloud-native approaches for survival and to better meet customer needs. CIOs, CTOs, and CFOs aimed to foster business resilience and business continuity.

According to IBM’s Institute for Business Value, 72% of 5,000 C-suite IT leaders surveyed emphasized end-user experience, whereas 68% of the respondents prioritized business continuity.

This perhaps indicates the enterprise’s ambition to transform digitally. As IDC predicted that digital transformation spending will grow at a CAGR of 16.4% over the 2021-2025 forecast period, business leaders are poised to achieve holistic digital strategy across people, processes, technology, and governance.

And many of the digital transformation priorities would be enhancing operational objectives around Human Resources, security & risk, Enterprise IT, accounting & finance, according to Craig Simpson, senior research manager at IDC.

Notably, digital transformation can benefit only if the critical mission is managed by agile ITSM practices.

This necessarily prioritizes the ITSM transformation as well in order to align with the digital transformation mission.

Here’s why ITSM transformation is important to digital transformation aspects.

What is ITSM?

Information Technology Service Management or ITSM defines the ability of an IT organization or, more specifically, infrastructure & operations (I&O)managers to facilitate end-to-end IT service delivery through robust management of internal IT tasks and workflows.

A simpler definition of ITSM is making IT service delivery easy and fast through proper oversight of the implementation plan, tracking technology processes, and measuring the progress through workflow management.

For organizations that are engaged in new application development, product testing, cloud strategy, and management of service level agreements, look for agile ITSM practices.

By leveraging a robust ITSM tool, an IT organization can successfully oversee and facilitate,

  • Incident management
  • Service management
  • Change management
  • IT asset management, etc

ITSM is the best component for a service desk in an organization. However, non-IT business processes also use ITSM to enable enterprise service management.

How does ITSM accelerate digital transformation?

Digital transformation aims to bring change to the forefront of organizational processes. But, change always does not mean process efficiency and user experience.

Any new addition of tools and workflows to the work processes, if not widely accepted, is unlikely to bring the business outcomes as IT leaders aspire from their digital transformation initiatives.

For example, suppose your business allocates a pool of new tools and technologies for your people. This is a change in the workplace. But what if they continue to deliver the same level of productivity without much difference in outcomes?

This requires a careful approach to tracking change management and inspiring user engagement.

ITSM best practices help facilitate strategic digital transformation by enabling IT leaders to track and monitor the effectiveness of organization-wide change.

Viewed as similar to agile methodologies, ITSM can be a significant tool for CIOs to ‘Build, Measure, Learn, and Repeat.’ Greg Douglass, SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR – TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY & ADVISORY​, is of the opinion for the above statement.

He also suggests that an operating model built on agile methodologies (like that of ITSM) can bring on rapid value early rather than waiting for years for digital transformation to complete.

However, business is unlikely to tap essential benefits from digital transformation unless ITSM evolves from its traditional approach. ITSM transformation is key to facilitating digital transformation, so modernization of ITSM is significant.

Why is modernized ITSM key to your digital transformation?

Just as the pandemic surged, the influx of digital tools was quite a norm. This pace of change wasn’t easy to handle for leaders.

The business complexity around data governance and rapid change in service management only add to more challenges.

The 2021 IBM CIO Study focuses on the importance of digital transformation for business continuity and operational resilience post-pandemic.

According to CIOs reported in this study, about 20%-40% of business processes have been automated.

Percentage of automation in various business processes

Besides, IT budgets for new tools and technologies also increased.

Increase in technology investments

When tools and applications are complex, adopting just a traditional ITSM practice won’t drive business efficiency and operations. A solid ITSM strategy can help businesses deliver services and make customers happy.

“What customers expected from their technology services 5 years ago is light years away from their expectations today, so the management of those services need to adapt and change,”

- KPMG’s Mitch Kenfield

Kenfield’s view is still relevant today. And it is indeed important for ITSM to change or transform if CIOs look to achieve digital transformation at scale.

What are the areas in which ITSM acts as a catalyst for digital transformation?

An ITSM-based operating model must encompass modern tools and applications to aid digital transformation across enterprises or SMBs.

Knowledge management in a modern way

Knowledge management is a massive necessity for IT organizations to facilitate operational efficiency.

But, knowledge management resources that lack the ability to provide context and instant help only compound business complexity rather than relieving employee stress.

  • AITSM-powered knowledge management reads through the history and updates its database with appropriate knowledge.
  • Generative AI also makes it easy to improve the searchability of appropriate knowledge articles to accelerate service management through DIY attempts.
  • Multi-channel integration through MS Teams, Slack, or web widgets makes it easy for internal employees to achieve process efficiency and restore service interruptions steadily.

Accelerate Your ITSM Digital Transformation.

AI in ITSM for incident management

The modern ITSM allows you to tap the potential of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing.

When combined, these technologies are best used to create automated workflows to handle incidents. As soon as an incident is logged, workflows get activated immediately to solve the issues rapidly.

AI enables the categorization of incidents, prioritization, ticket creation, and ticket escalation to the right person who can handle it.

Modern ITSM platforms are easy to create automated workflows. The one critical aspect is that users are slow to adapt to the hard-core ITSM ecosystem, and incident resolution may be in conflict.

A self-service portal through ITSM chatbot integration in your collaboration channel delivers faster mean time to response or MTR.

As a result, IT businesses can see a number of benefits,

  • A reduced number of ticket volumes
  • Better insights and reporting to predict future issues and prepare for uncertainties
  • Real-time SLA management
  • Vendor-relationship management

IT Asset management

IT assets are critical to continuing business operations. Monitoring every application's operational capability and serviceability becomes a significant aspect of business continuity. ITSM digital transformation is better than the traditional approach of notifying of the end of SLA or suggesting predictive maintenance for IT assets to facilitate active IT asset management.

AI-powered automated workflows help IT leaders save time by reducing the mundane job of monitoring IT assets manually while resolving more critical issues with ease.

Robust service management

It is evident that IT organizations struggle with 80% of repetitive tasks at the service desk. The most mundane processes employees seek help are,

  • Password resets
  • Device provisioning
  • Unlock accounts
  • Software installs

Since traditional ITSM provides less visibility across the ticket history and status, IT agents face ticket fatigue more often due to the scenario of repeatedly handling the same ticket.

AI transformation ITSM reduces the probability of errors and increases process efficiency by facilitating autonomous self-serve capabilities.

Say a new hire needs a new laptop and necessary tools and applications. Through the automation of Access Identity Management, an automatic software installation can be done, whereas new tools and application provisioning can be made easy.

Change management through data-driven decisions

Success in digital transformation is only possible with proper change management.

Change may be rigid when a new tool or process is implemented organization-wide. An AI-powered ITSM practice helps harness data insights for in-depth analysis and to implement the strategy that encourages swift adaptation to the change.

In an interview with Accenture, Greg Douglass suggests that organizations must focus on increasing their employees' talent quotient when there is too much assimilation of tools.Reskilling is the best option. By creating an appropriate LMS for your ITSM, you can better contribute to employee optimization and make them feel comfortable with the change.

What are the benefits of ITSM for digital transformation?

Digital transformation is as bland as just a strategy if not appropriately implemented and monitored. AI ITSM transformation facilitates the business objectives of IT leaders. There are immense possibilities for ITSM transformation to drive successful digital transformation.

Operational efficiency through automation of internal workflows

Automated workflows accelerate operational efficiency across IT, HR, marketing, supply chain, and ITOps, enabling end-to-end IT service delivery and expediting enhanced customer experience.

With workflows designed and implemented in ITSM platforms, they tend to reduce additional effort and time to take care of critical business operations such as

  • Employee onboarding
  • Leave management
  • Document management and approval
  • Device provisioning
  • Invoice processing and payment
  • Procurement in the supply chain

For example, AI-powered chatbots reduce customer friction as well as improve productivity for internal employees.

According to a report by Standford and MIT, generative AI chatbots helped boost workers’ productivity by 14% for one tech company.

Reducing operational costs

A modern ITSM infrastructure can aid cost efficiency and savings. With reduced repetitive tickets and effective end-to-end ticket lifecycle management, IT agents can reduce 80% of repetitive tasks.

Self-service enablement and agent handover through natural language processing that understands the intent and derives knowledge extractions drive cost efficiency.

It also means that agents are less involved in ticket handling, which saves agent utilization and ticket costs.

Therefore, companies optimizing the AITSM platform save a huge amount on operational budget and reduce the impact on the bottom line. Also, investment in AI ITSM transformation pays off in the long run and offers better ROI.

Ease of access to agile ITSM

ITSM practices can be inflexible and inconvenient for your IT teams if they still involve the traditional approach, meaning if they are not agile.

Agile ITSM is a need to remain competitive and bring a collaborative approach to DevOps and IT practices.

“By 2023, 80% of ITSM teams that have not adopted an agile approach will find their ITSM practices are ignored or bypassed as a result of more agile ways of working being adopted elsewhere in the organization.”

- Gartner

AI transformation for IT service management ensures Infrastructure & Operations leaders implement agile methodologies and best practices for software development and DevOps with flexible, collaborative, and iterative approaches across the ITSM platform. That being said, agile ITSM also brings the top practices mentioned in the ITIL-4 to help streamline work processes with automation, facilitate customer-centric service management, etc.

The value addition of Workativ to your ITSM transformation

Competitiveness is being able to adapt and conform to the changes steadily, so you can accomplish a complete digital transformation by embracing the ITSM transformation.

Enterprise use cases are built around the necessity of IT service delivery, wherein ITSM complements the enterprise objectives.

To give you an effortless experience for your digital transformation, Workativ makes ITSM more agile and streamlined by developing no-code conversational AI chatbots for your ITSM platforms.

Irrespective of your choice of platforms, be it ServiceNow, Jira, HaloITSM, Ivanti, SysAid, or InvGate, Workativ makes it super easy for you to build conversational AI chatbots and sync them inside collaborative channels like MS Teams or Slack. This gives uninterrupted flexibility to automate app workflows for those ITSM platforms and auto-resolve issues at scale without spending on reskilling or talent development.

Embrace ITSM transformation with Workativ and be prepared to drive digital transformation success.

Have ITSM transformation in mind? Set up a demo call with Workativ Sales Team today!

FAQs on ITSM-powered digital transformation

What should be the correct approach to enabling ITSM transformation?

The world of IT is evolving at a rapid pace. It shouldn’t be like that you implement it and then forget it. A continuous tweak based on the changes that come up effectively facilitates IT service delivery in real-time and prevents any future impact on service management.

Auto-resolve 60% of Your Employee Queries With Generative AI Chatbot & Automation.

Deepa Majumder

Content Writer

Deepa Majumder is a writer who nails the art of crafting bespoke thought leadership articles to help business leaders tap into rich insights in their journey of organization-wide digital transformation. Over the years, she has dedicatedly engaged herself in the process of continuous learning and development across business continuity management and organizational resilience.

Her pieces intricately highlight the best ways to transform employee and customer experience. When not writing, she spends time on leisure activities.