Your ITSM May Be Failing and Here’s Why

Information Technology Service Management, or ITSM, is the implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of a business and its customers. ITSM is invaluable, especially as it improves services’ efficiency, manages changes, reduces operational costs, and ensures fair accountability.

Unfortunately, not many organizations succeed in achieving their ITSM goals because their implementations are faulty. Let’s take a look at six major reasons behind this inefficiency.

Reason 1) A Short-Sighted Approach

For an ITSM implementation to succeed, it must establish long-term business process improvements. For this purpose, organizations need effective ITSM solutions that are well supported by efficient business process controls.

However, in an attempt to speed up the process, organizations may opt for quick fixes. Sometimes, these fixes do not include the implementation of ITSM frameworks and best practices like ITIL or ISO 20000.
Moreover, more emphasis remains on ‘technology’ rather than on the ‘process’ component. Therefore, implementing tools without optimizing process controls results in the lack of the ability to address real time challenges of your organization.

A short-sighted approach may help resolve the symptoms of your problem. However, its causes may be left undetected. Moreover, you can expect your organization to face new issues without a formal ITSM framework in place.

Reason 2) Lack of Understanding Requirements and ITSM Maturity

Effective ITSM implementation requires a good understanding of what’s required and the organization’s current ITSM maturity level.

It is imperative to identify stakeholder groups and gather and understand their functional needs, pain points, and technical needs. This can be a challenge considering their busy schedule. However, their input is an important part of the requirements documentation.

Similarly, implementing ITSM first requires in-depth gap assessment to uncover the current state of ITSM practices.
That way, a formal strategy can be planned accordingly to achieve the desired future state.

Reason 3) Data-Related Mistakes

ITSM processes are highly dependent on the availability of accurate and integrated data. However, it is common for data-related mistakes to dramatically decrease the performance of your ITSM implementation.
Examples of such mistakes include:

• Underestimating Administrative Overhead – Organizations may fail to factor the time required for loading data into their system. Combined with the lack of a maintenance and administration plan and accountability clarity, this mistake can be problematic.
• Including Garbage – Without effective data cleaning, poor quality data can become part of the organization’s ITSM. As a result, the quality of data in other parts of the system will be compromised. Moreover, cleaning this mess will be more costly and will demand more resources.
• Lack of Planning for Change – Business and IT will constantly change, so your ITSM needs to be flexible. Without support for re-organization, growth and mergers, the system will fail.

Reason 4) Overlooked Organizational Change Management

Organizational Change Management, – i.e. the actions an organization takes to alter one of its major components – is essential for ITSM. Without a consistent drive for successful adoption and usage of change, it will be difficult and costly for the organization to shift to ITSM.

Therefore, organizations and consultants need to address the impact of ITSM to the people, culture, processes, etc. People especially tend to be overlooked, which is why organizations face complaints and naysaying. Because of these, even highly efficient ITSM implementations can be deemed failures.

Reason 5) Lack of Continual Service Improvement and Governance

Implementing IT service management systems is not a “one and done” deal. While you may celebrate the success of the systems and their results, you need to think ahead.

Your strategy will change over time to meet current and future challenges. As a result, the organization should aim to continually improve process capability and maturity. Therefore, a plan for continual service improvement is a must.

Similarly, governance is essential for implementation. An established governance system helps define roles, responsibilities, accountabilities and a direction for aligning service management goals with enterprise level goals.

Reason 6) Lack of Focus on Impact on the Business and its Customers

Organizations may place too much emphasis on IT performance metrics rather than those related to those measuring impact on the business and its customers/users. This, again, causes the value from the implementation to become less, which in turn leads to deeming it a failure.

In the case of KPIs, your focus should be on those which impact the business customers/users such as network downtime and incident escalations.

Another thing a business should focus on is operational efficiency through process improvement. In particular, it should assess its ability to run, grow, and innovate after the implementation.

Let Us Make Your ITSM Implementation a Success

With an experience of almost two decades, our consultants can help you realize the benefits of ITSM implementation.
In addition to using tried and tested best practices and frameworks, Business Beam provides Organizational Change Management additional services including Executive Advisory, Strategy Alignment, Service Management Planning, and Rollout Support. Through these, we ensure your system’s success.

If you have a vision in mind, we would love to hear it and further refine it to become an efficient system at your organization. So, do not hesitate to get in touch with us.