Why IT is the core of your business and how to strengthen it with ITSM best practices

IT is not just a support function for modern businesses; it is the heartbeat of your company’s success. That is why you should know how to supercharge it for unprecedented growth and competitiveness. Dive into this article to uncover the vital role IT plays. Enjoy the step-by-step guide to fortifying your IT foundation with cutting-edge practices and technology.

It’s hard to imagine a company not using any kind of modern technology. Perhaps there are some, but they usually don’t gain world recognition. Furthermore, they constitute but a minuscule fraction of all businesses.

Therefore, it would not be too bold to state that IT is the core of nearly every business. If you are reading this on your company device, it applies to you as well! IT covers such a vast range of company activities that the firm basically would not survive without it. In this article, we will explain why IT is the core of your business and how to make it stronger to serve your business better.

We would like to take this opportunity to show you a detailed picture of all areas of IT present in your business. Of course, we could talk about things like ERPs, CRMs, POSs, VPNs, BI, and other interesting acronyms. However, we’d rather focus on the benefits all these IT wonders bring to make your company stronger. Let’s analyze a few good ideas.

As the saying goes, IT helps you “work smart, not hard”. Digital systems and tools streamline operations, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance productivity. Consequently, your business can achieve more with fewer resources, reducing operational costs and improving profitability. And when it comes to the “smart” part, technology can also weigh in. Information is an invaluable asset, and IT provides the tools to collect, analyze, and derive insights from data. Data-driven decision-making will allow your company to make informed choices, identify trends, and adapt strategies accordingly.

A good example of productivity benefits is provided in Atlassian’s ITSM Guide. The document quotes Forrester Consulting’s report which shows a 61% improvement in agent productivity. It means that products such as Jira Service Management can contribute to productivity thanks to streamlining and automating IT and business service processes, reducing service downtime, and improving collaboration. This ultimately leads to increased operational efficiency.

IT is essential in pushing your company towards the future. The most common topic here is digital transformation. IT enables your company to digitize processes, products, and services, allowing them to reach customers more efficiently. Moreover, the next step, called digital acceleration is aimed at rapidly adopting digital technologies to achieve specific short-term goals. When you apply such approaches, you can be sure that you are moving forward with your business.

A survey from “The Economist” report shows that 73% of respondents have had digital transformation initiatives going on for at least two years. Something similar is going on about company innovation. IT fosters this by providing tools and platforms for research and development. As a result, your company can create new products and services, adapt to market changes, and respond to emerging trends more rapidly.

Technology can also aid in the battle for customers. Adopting certain innovations can help you outperform your competitors, respond to market shifts quickly, and adapt to changing customer demands. Additionally, IT plays a pivotal role in enhancing the customer experience. Through customer relationship management (CRM) systems, personalized marketing, e-commerce platforms, and efficient communication channels, businesses can better serve their customers’ needs and preferences.

Technology allows you to stretch your area of influence both in terms of customers and employees. E-commerce, online advertising, and social media marketing enable companies to engage with a global audience and tap into new revenue streams.

Now, let’s look at the other side of the coin. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of IT in enabling remote work and providing flexibility in how and where employees work. A survey from the ITSM 2021 & Beyond report shows that only 5% of respondents remained in the office, thus creating a gateway for new IT solutions. The aforesaid flexibility has become a key factor in attracting and retaining talent. The positive outcomes of this are visible to date.

IT supports managing every aspect of your company. For instance, technological systems help optimize supply chain operations, from inventory management and demand forecasting to logistics and distribution. Efficient supply chain management reduces costs and ensures products reach customers on time.

And speaking of costs, your digital transformation has value here as well. While IT investments are necessary, they can lead to long-term cost savings. Cloud computing, for example, eliminates the need for extensive physical infrastructure, reducing capital expenditures. A Forbes article adds that embracing the Cloud gives other benefits such as better insights into big data, more efficient scalability, collaboration as well as business continuity.

Putting all things together, IT has become the backbone of modern businesses, enabling them to operate efficiently, stay competitive, innovate, and adapt to changing market dynamics. For this reason, the need to handle IT activities has grown in importance. This led to the creation of IT Service Management (ITSM). We have already explained this term in our previous article, nevertheless, it’s worth reminding the essentials. ITSM provides the necessary processes and tools allowing for efficient management of IT services.

The role of ITSM is invaluable to the technical and business side of the company. When it comes to the latter, the use of ITSM has gone even further. The approach has evolved so far, that nowadays we can speak of Enterprise Service Management (ESM). Forrester explains that ESM means “extending IT service management capabilities beyond technology services to address business-centric use cases; managing service demand and supply through a common platform, portal, and service catalog; and speeding up innovation and workflow automation through PaaS/low-code development tooling.”

In other words, ESM is an organized approach to incorporating IT into other domains. After all, embracing technology and integrating IT into strategic planning is essential for sustained success in the modern business environment. Since we know that, we can move on to the next part: how can you strengthen the IT core of your company?

Since you already know why IT serves a major role in your business, it’s time to put it into practice. In the next sections, you will learn how to incorporate ITSM into your company to make it more resilient, adaptable, and, most importantly, profitable. Find out everything in our step-by-step guide below.

As you might have already discovered, ITSM is a broad term encompassing various practices, regulations, and software. To incorporate Managed IT Services into your company, you can follow the steps below.

Start your journey by defining clear and specific objectives. Understand what you want to achieve with ITSM within your organization. This could include improving service quality, reducing IT costs, enhancing customer satisfaction, or aligning IT services with broader business goals.

Atlassian’s handbook outlines five essential elements that need to be established as part of determining your business-oriented objectives: “Stakeholders (Who); Scope of the work (What); Approach, constraints, assumptions (How); Expected business outcomes (Why); Success measurements (Evaluate).” The last one serves as a summary of all your efforts in setting your goals.

Establishing a strong connection between IT goals and the overarching business objectives is essential. It ensures that ITSM efforts directly contribute to the company’s success. Such an approach will make planning and designing strategies for Managed IT Services much easier.

Before implementing ITSM practices, conduct a comprehensive assessment of your current IT environment. This involves evaluating existing IT processes, technology infrastructure, and the skills of your IT team.

Identify strengths and weaknesses in your current IT setup. Assess how well your IT operations are currently meeting business needs and where there is room for improvement. Remember to be brutally honest in your assessment. If you are unsure how to evaluate the state of things, don’t hesitate to hire a professional as this step is critical to your future IT success.

Choose an ITSM framework or one compatible with this approach that best fits your organization’s needs. Some common frameworks include ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies), and ISO/IEC 20000.

Each ITSM framework has its own set of best practices and guidelines. Select the one that is the most suitable for your organization’s objectives and culture. Make sure you understand each framework well before going further. Reading the ITSM framework section in our previous article can be a good starting point.

Develop and document ITSM processes that are tailored to your organization’s unique requirements. While ITSM frameworks provide a foundation, it’s crucial to adapt these processes to suit your specific business context.

Make these processes perfectly match the framework you’ve chosen. Documenting them is essential for consistency and clear communication within the organization. Ensure the processes are understandable and executable – don’t be afraid to test them out with your staff.

Select and implement ITSM software solutions that support your newly designed processes. These tools can help automate routine tasks, track incidents, manage service requests, and provide analytics for performance improvement.

Invest in solutions that are compatible with your chosen framework and can scale as your organization grows. If you would like to explore flexible ITMS tools that offer the largest number of features and thus are most likely to match your business needs, you can visit this site.

Foster a culture of service excellence and continuous improvement within the IT department. Encourage collaboration, open communication, and a customer-centric mindset among IT professionals.

Provide training and skill development opportunities for your IT staff. Ensure they are well-versed in ITSM principles and the specific processes and tools you’ve implemented. If you would like to receive practical tips on ways to support your staff, this site might be a good starting point!

Implement a robust monitoring and measurement system to continuously assess the performance of your IT services and processes. This involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and gathering feedback from both internal and external stakeholders.

Regularly review the data collected and use it to make informed decisions for process improvement. ITSM is an iterative process, and adjustments should be made as needed to enhance service quality and efficiency.

Effective communication is essential throughout the ITSM incorporation process. Keep all stakeholders informed about the changes and improvements in IT services. This includes regular updates to employees, customers, and management regarding the progress of ITSM implementation.

Ensure that your messages are understandable in terms of avoiding jargon. They should also match the recipients’ perspective in terms of business goals and achieving desired results. Clear and transparent communication helps build trust and ensures everyone is consistent with the ITSM goals.

Incorporating ITSM into a company is a strategic initiative that requires commitment and collaboration across the organization. By following these steps, you can establish an ITSM framework that not only improves IT service delivery but also aligns IT with broader business objectives, ultimately driving organizational success.

But before this becomes attainable, you might need some more ideas about how to implement specific ITSM components. Luckily for you, we laid out the best practices for that in the following section.

In our previous article, we enumerated five basic components of ITSM. These included:

If you are serious about revolutionizing your company operations and gaining better results by enhancing your business’s beating heart – IT, you will need some guidance. For this reason, we would like to give you ready-to-use implementation best practices for each component. Let’s investigate them!

Implementing ITSM processes is a strategic endeavor. It can significantly enhance IT service efficiency, quality, and alignment with business objectives. Whether you’re adopting ITSM for the first time or refining existing processes, following best practices is crucial. Begin by defining clear objectives that tie ITSM processes to broader business outcomes. Then, assess your current IT landscape and select an appropriate ITSM framework like ITIL or COBIT. When you understand your ongoing processes, it’s time to make bigger moves.

Firstly, customize the ITSM processes to fit your unique requirements, involve stakeholders, and establish roles and responsibilities. Afterward, implement ITSM tools, invest in staff training, and conduct pilot testing before full-scale deployment. To guarantee that everything works, monitor and measure performance with defined KPIs. You can maintain order by keeping clear documentation and ensuring compliance.

However, the most important part is allowing yourself to test out, experiment, and even make mistakes. Embrace a culture of continual improvement. Celebrate accomplishments, and periodically adapt processes to evolving business needs. These best practices will help your company drive service quality, reduce operational risks, and align IT with overarching business goals. As a result, ITSM will become a strategic asset for overall success and competitiveness.

The practical application of such enriched ITSM processes can stretch vastly across the organization. For instance, interdepartmental processes can include multiple positions, yet be transparent and perfectly executable. Another example is HR departments using Issue Templates for Jira to make the onboarding process smoother.

Effectively managing ITSM staff is crucial for making IT services compatible with organizational goals and enhancing service quality. To achieve success, you should encourage a customer-centric approach, invest in continuous training and skill development, and foster a culture of innovation and collaboration among staff. Another great idea is defining clear roles and responsibilities and cultivating a knowledge-sharing environment. Of course, you can’t forget about Monitoring performance through metrics and KPIs, recognizing outstanding achievements, and promoting stress management and work-life balance are essential elements of staff management.

Empower staff to make decisions within their areas of responsibility and provide opportunities for career development and growth. Ultimately, when ITSM staff members are well-equipped, motivated, and aligned with customer needs and business objectives, the IT department becomes a strategic asset that drives organizational success. Nevertheless, sometimes you might find that your IT department is lacking roles having specific skills. The best course of action in this scenario is to hire external ITSM support specialists who will help you manage certain areas of your project. They can assist you until your project is done or you hire experts of your own.

If you want to maximize ITSM technology benefits, you can do it in the following way. Firstly, align your software with organizational objectives and processes, provide comprehensive user training, and ensure data accuracy. Afterward, integrate your solutions with other systems, perform regular updates, and then customize them to organizational needs.

The last step is monitoring ITSM software performance, maintaining support from your solution vendor, securing sensitive data, and communicating changes effectively. Remember that leveraging ITSM tech is crucial for efficient IT services, user satisfaction, and making your IT and business goals go together. This will lead you to drive digital transformation and achieve operational success.

Reaching such results demands the right tools. Why not opt for solutions that can perfectly adapt to your company’s needs then? Jira Service Management is the number one ITSM tool on the market. It can meet the needs of nearly every company in existence. It offers a wide selection of features that empower your IT and business teams to obtain optimal performance and enjoy the extra time that can be devoted to customer experience and excellence. Once you equip your company with such versatile software, you can ensure that your ITMS practices will bring tangible and permanent benefits.

4. Best practices for ITSM documentation

Effective ITSM documentation practices include standardization, version control, and access control. There are also other factors that you need to observe: regular reviews, clear ownership, and automation. Not to mention staff training that allows to creation and maintenance the documentation in a controlled and predictable way. Such practices provide structure, consistency, and accountability to IT processes and services. This, in turn, leads to improved quality, compliance, and continuous improvement.

How to keep your documentation in order then? Get a proper documentation-oriented tool! Confluence is such a solution – it works brilliantly as a knowledge base and document repository. The solution features collaborative editing and version control for successful documentation creation. It also supports efficient documentation workflow via customization and integration options, a practical search engine, and access control for restricting certain files. In short, Confluence is a must-have for managing ITSM documentation.

Effective ITSM metrics and KPIs are essential for measuring your ITSM performance. To establish them correctly, match them with business goals, prioritize quality over quantity, and monitor regularly. Once they start serving their purpose right, benchmark your metrics against industry standards, communicate results for transparency, and, if necessary, adapt them to changing priorities.

These tools are essential for evaluating the performance of Managed IT Services, aligning IT with business objectives, and driving continuous improvement in IT processes and services. Ultimately, they optimize ITSM practices and deliver high-quality IT services. However, the question remains: how to introduce the right KPIs and metrics into your ITSM practices? The answer is once again: Jira Service Management.

Among numerous Atlassian tools, Jira Service Management offers the most capabilities in terms of handling ITSM metrics and KPIs. To start with, the solution is in line with common ITSM practices, so it can measure performance and workflows against pre-set targets well. Furthermore, common values such as Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) are perfectly traceable inside the ITSM software. Customization options for reporting also play a vital role in creating granular statements.

The last part constitutes features that help improve the metrics such as automation, or customer satisfaction surveys. These functionalities not only allow you to measure KPIs but also let you meet them faster through improved work efficiency. If you want to keep track of your goals, Jira Service Management is the one-stop shop for you.

We have gone through implementing best practices across the five core components of IT Service Management. What you most should remember from this part is the need for strategic alignment of IT processes with broader business objectives. Another critical factor is appreciating continual improvement in driving service quality, reducing operational risks, and enhancing overall competitiveness.

The best move available for you is the adoption of powerful ITSM tools such as Jira Service Management and Confluence to facilitate efficient ITSM practices. These solutions offer comprehensive features for measuring performance, managing documentation, and tracking KPIs. Their endgame is to optimize IT services and contribute to your company’s success. By following these best practices and leveraging appropriate technology, you can harness the full potential of ITSM to revolutionize your operations and deliver high-quality results.

The central role of IT in modern businesses is beyond doubt. This domain is at the core of nearly every business and remains intertwined with various aspects of its operations. This translates into several key benefits, such as increased productivity, constant development, competitive advantage, global reach, and effective company management. The best example is the case of the COVID-19 pandemic which accelerated the need for remote work solutions and digital flexibility.

You are most likely aware of the critical role played by IT in business. Nevertheless, we wanted to provide you with essential steps to increase the capacity of this department of your company. These steps included defining ITSM objectives, assessing the current IT state, selecting an ITSM framework, designing ITSM processes, implementing ITSM tools, and more. Of course, another key aspect is the need for IT to be integrated into strategic planning, thus, leveraging ITSM software such as Jira Service Management and Confluence. Only by applying such an approach, can you optimize IT services and contribute to overall organizational success.