IT Service Management and digital: a close union

Service Management is at the heart of digital transformation 

Because IT and business teams must take into account the ever closer convergence of IT Service Management and digital transformation.   

With the emergence, many people have found themselves "catapulted" into a digital society where people work, shop and relate through a screen.

For many it was a dream, for others a nightmare, others had simply never thought about it until now or had never had the opportunity to experience it.The intensive use of digital channels - at home and at work - has reshaped expectations; there is a Tradelab survey, carried out in 2020 in the run-up to the pandemic, which partly mapped them:

• Schools and universities: 62% expect to be able to continue to use services dedicated to education through digital channels
• PA and companies: 57% would like to use digital services both in dealing with PA and in interacting with business activities
• Working: 46% would like to continue to benefit from tried and tested ways of working (work from home, smart working)

These expectations, today, weigh heavily on the relationship with employees and customers.  

Think of the phenomenon of Great Resignation. Where the possibility of working remotely has disappeared, dozens of professionals have resigned, looking for organisations that could guarantee them to work in an agile manner and attentive to their needs for flexibility and balance.

Or to the desire, on the consumer side, to live "unified commerce" experiences, being able to decide at any time where, when and how to interact with the brand and make use of its services, without ever losing the thread between the multitude of channels used.

Digital is the answer for companies 

Companies are accelerating their digital adoption process to adapt their operations and work structures to the current needs of consumers and employees in order to offer them the experience they expect.

Digitalisation, in fact, facilitates connections with customers and employees, but above all it offers new service opportunities. And there is a virtuous circle of value creation that starts precisely from the relationship between digitisation and service.

This was revealed by a recent research conducted by the University of Padua: in the SMEs analysed, the introduction of services through digital technologies proved to be the most effective way to support interactions with customers and employees (who are the managers of customer interactions) and indirectly innovate the offer, starting with optimised processes and continuous value creation, thanks to the collection of useful data for strategy.

Companies that extend their offerings with digital services accessible to people from wherever they connect - e.g. customer-centred assistance, self-service and knowledge - are able through the data collected in the digital 'supply chain' to obtain a better understanding of the market and the needs of their stakeholders and thus to elaborate a better value proposition and exploit opportunities for product innovation.

The service experience is still too Technology Oriented 

The technology with which companies perform their digital evolution is an integral part of IT processes. IT Service Management is concerned with linking these processes and the people involved in them to deliver IT services that guarantee internal operations and outputs to the end customer.

But ITSM can no longer hide behind a catalogue of demands or traditional IT support.   

Too often IT focuses on the technical aspects of technology, without shifting attention to what is really important: the result (providing effective services) and the manner in which the result is achieved (the combination of processes resulting in the technological service).

In many companies, the service experience is still too "technology oriented". The technology to be used in digitisation processes and digital service offerings is evaluated according to IT objectives and not those of the user. A trivial question such as " does the technology enable the user to achieve his goals in an agile way? Are there more effective/easy/intuitive ways to support him/her? ” is not covered.

Yet, the satisfaction of the user - employee or end customer - should be part of the business objectives. So if digital transformation touches people, why is the only point of view to address a digital transformation the technical one?

The evolution of IT Service Management 

Recent evolutions of ITIL, the de facto standard in IT service management, point to an increasing convergence of IT and business objectives, with 'recognisable' advantages for the latter, such as:  

• measuring and optimising the quality of service.
• increased operational productivity by identifying bottlenecks
• the reduction of operating costs, thanks to higher efficiency

The maturity achieved by ITSM principles, best practices and technologies is leading to a sharing of knowledge of Service Management outside IT: to benefit other functions and business lines offering services to users and customers such as human resources, facility management, customer care.

The possibility of structuring user-friendly portals, of integrating service management data (e.g. related to asset management) across business units, of modulating and automating workflows according to user needs, of rapidly distributing new requests in the service catalogue, is leading Business Service Management - i.e. the digitisation of business service delivery - to become normality in companies.

Digital, in fact, makes it possible to offer a better service experience, because it is accessible 24/7 through a single request interface, measurable in individual process components and as a whole (the perceived quality of service) and therefore improvable, but above all increasingly personalised and responsive.

Think of reduced request processing times thanks to the speed of automation and predictive intelligence using machine learning to provide knowledge articles or respond to requests, the insights provided by machine learning to anticipate trends, the intelligent collaboration of chatbots and RPA bots for a service "closer" to users.  

The point of view of WEGG 

The possibilities offered by technology are endless. Advanced RPA functionality, machine learning, data processing can help offer better services and reduce operating costs. They can be used to introduce a shift-left concept, i.e. to shift skills to the left.

For example, algorithms can learn to handle the most frequent requests in such a way that the most skilled resources - to the right of a hypothetical cost/expertise per request handled graph - can devote themselves to more valuable tasks.

But in all this, we must not lose sight of the fact that technology is a means, not the end: it is up to us to put our intelligence into designing the processes that underlie technology. To make sure that the human constant is always present in the equation.

Service Management technology must be chosen and designed around the needs of people, who must be listened to, involved and understood at all times, from initial assessment to design. Also starting with the unspoken: remember Ford's customers who wanted "faster horses"? 

At WEGG, we deal with digitising business functions (IT, HR, customer care, etc.) by means of digital services: our approach involves setting requirements and technical functionalities closely linked to the achievement of the objectives of the users involved, who are our starting point.

We believe, in fact, that the mere digital transposition of processes into Service Management platforms is insufficient: we may well meet the technological objective by introducing UX-friendly interfaces and automated back-ends, but not that of the users, who may find themselves replicating the same redundancies and inefficiencies they experienced in analogue.

Starting with an analysis in which we identify the simplest, most efficient and most direct path for them, we ensure that technology relates requirements and outputs (including inter- and intra-functional) with minimum effort and maximum output. We also ensure the continuous measurability of processes in order to improve them.

 *Article by Francesco Clabot, CTO of WEGG and professor of IT Service Management at the University of Padua, taken from his speech at the  "Digital Transformation" round table  organised by Data Manager Online.