Many enterprises complain that despite hefty investments in technology, growth targets elude them. One reason for this predicament is the disconnect between the right technology and strategy.
The lag or even failure in achieving better outcomes underscores the importance of effective alignment between strategy and technology.
IT software management, or ITSM, is perfectly customized for this ambitious growth scenario. The products of brands like Open Text Corporation help businesses in optimizing their systems towards enhanced productivity.
To stay successful, the ecosystem must have proclaimed business goals, awareness about the technology landscape, and floating opportunities. This incentive leads to a viable strategic ITSM plan that integrates both strategy and technology applications.
Core benefits aligned approach
Leveraging structured ITSM processes significantly improves process efficiency. The benefits of an ITSM rollout are hard to ignore. They bring about benefits like cost reduction from automation and structured management. Rising customer satisfaction from a clear strategy will ensure services are of high quality and boost user experience.
For example, a business moving to a cloud-based platform will have to spell out both the business goals and the ITSM architecture. There must be plans to automate processes, streamline workflows, and improve incident response times. This alignment with technology streams works like a sort of business transformation. Companies looking for such solutions approach providers like Opentext.
Preparations prior to ITSM rollout
Before introducing ITSM management software, there is a need to set measurable goals as the gateway to positive business outcomes. Some of the goals are higher revenue, increased customer satisfaction, rapid improvement of operational efficiency, etc.
There must be consistent updates on the current technology landscape in terms of existing systems, infrastructure, and capabilities to grasp both strengths and weaknesses.
The ITSM tool will help to analyze the gap between current capabilities and desired business outcomes, and the strategy can be tweaked to improve performance.
The strategic IT plan must serve as a roadmap to outline areas where technology can reinforce business goals in terms of implementations, upgrades, and integrations. Parallelly, increased collaboration and communication via open communication among IT teams, business leaders, and other stakeholders must happen to hit the targets.
The ITSM plan must be comprehensive enough to ensure technology investments are in line with the strategic priorities. At the same time, provide space for trending new technologies too.
The technology investments must strike a balance between short-term and long-term strategic goals, including customer preferences and expectations. In making them more achievable under a time-bound program, define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of newly aligned initiatives.
Cross-functional collaboration must be sustained for new innovations and continuous improvement. The teams must jointly build a well-organized database to ensure accuracy and efficiency.
Factors to consider for ITSM alignment
There are many case studies asserting how vigorous aligning of business strategy and ITSM technology has ushered in business objectives and higher IT service delivery.
A case study on mobile service provider Vodafone will be illustrative. It implemented a robust ITSM framework and was able to achieve dramatic performance improvements. The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) marked a significant drop in red and orange flags, marking the positive changes.
What’s more, the enterprise data services, or EDS, improved so much that the customer perception of the provider moved from a vendor to a partner as it won more global service contracts.
As for business enterprises aiming for a solid alignment of ITSM technologies and business goals, the key considerations must be ensuring the ITSM platform gels well with the organization’s style, needs, processes, and larger goals.
The process automation spin-off from ITSM interventions makes workflows streamlined and free of manual errors and ushers in a climate of higher efficiency.
As the quality of services improves, the resulting customer satisfaction will automatically enhance brand loyalty, market shares, and revenue. That must be music to the ears of all business owners.
