5 Top Benefits and Risks of IT Service Management for Businesses

Today’s businesses are increasingly dependent on internal IT departments to cater to their business needs, critical services, and functions. From managing risks and boosting resiliency to anticipating and proactively resolving issues, cost control, and management, the IT department takes care of many crucial aspects.

After the pandemic, IT organizations are now squarely responsible for business continuity and growth. But, the traditional break-fix approach of IT keeps the operations stuck in a pattern of firefighting mode, which in turn stops it from evolving into a strategic partner for companies.

IT organizations adopt IT service management (ITSM) to overcome such hurdles and ensure smoother business operations. It operates on the idea of delivering IT as a service to businesses so they can benefit from it rather than get stuck with the complexity of IT operations.

Listed below are the 5 main benefits of adopting ITSM as a guiding light for business IT operations.

1. Contents hide

   1 Standardization of IT Services Leads to Streamlined Operations

   2 Gives A Higher ROI on IT Investments

   3 Helps with Cost Reduction and Control

   4 Improves Business Efficiency and Effectiveness

   5 Better Visibility into Business Operations

   6 Conclusion

   Standardization of IT Services Leads to Streamlined Operations

Standardizing services, processes, tools, and policies leads to streamlined business workflows and better accountability. It also leads to easier communication and collaboration, which helps with business agility. ITSM helps implement functions like IT service desk and documentation describing the service delivery process for every type of IT service. IT managers can easily track operators’ actions and check how incidents or service requests are addressed. A high level of visibility into service delivery allows IT managers to review incidents, verify if services are being delivered consistently, and comply with official procedures.

1. Gives A Higher ROI on IT Investments

Investing in advanced IT tools and softwares is important, but it is only one part of the puzzle. To adopt and implement ITSM efficiently, it is crucial that your IT infrastructure is supported and regulated with proper processes in place. Organizations should invest in scheduled maintenance and management of such resources to avoid performance degradations. This is better than investing in a certain ITSM software and later abandoning it without measuring your ROI.

Effective management must be in place, executive and staff buy-in, and genuine process changes to achieve this. If your organization has invested in IT solutions and ITSM, then focusing on the people and processes supporting your ITSM initiatives is important.

1. Helps with Cost Reduction and Control

Investing in IT service management helps businesses eliminate redundancies and increase efficiency, thereby decreasing costs. As an added benefit, it increases resilience and agility for companies, allowing them to use definite and crucial resources for other important objectives.

According to Gartner, IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) spending represents approximately 60 percent of global IT spending.

The I&O staff makes up for half of the total IT staffing requirements. As these organizations scale further, they must hire more I&O staff or risk becoming burdened by tactical, operational processes. IT service management removes the need for excessive hiring through automation features to reduce manual workload for IT operators.

1. Improves Business Efficiency and Effectiveness

IT tools have been used by organizations for driving efficiencies for a long time now. But having an unplanned list of IT assets and resources without a proper strategy for their integration causes confusion and inefficiency.

IT service management has many components that help organizations make the most of their resources. For example, IT asset management is a set of processes used to optimize the life cycle management of IT assets and seek out the most cost-effective strategies for asset procurement and disposition.

Coming to effectiveness, adopting ITSM structures and processes benefit from formalized systems to drive improvement when executed effectively over time. A well-structured incident response management can reduce the average response time, and a crisis management system will help you reduce your mean time to recover (MTTR).

IT service management (ITSM) offers a framework for increasing the effectiveness of any aspect of your IT service delivery through the process of continual service improvement.

1. Better Visibility into Business Operations

Operations visibility refers to how managers and executive staff can see and understand who changed what in other business areas. Access to files and knowing what resources are available are important for anticipating potential problems and meeting compliance requirements.

IT service management requires alignment between IT and business strategy, which ensures that businesses are aware of IT operations which are on priority at all times.

The above points are a few of the major benefits of implementing ITSM for businesses.

However, the IT service management roadmap can get risky and bumpy. Inertia to change, lack of executive and organizational support, a mismatch between the tools selected and requirements of the organization, and misaligned strategies make it hard for organizations to implement an effective IT service delivery management model successfully.

To overcome such hurdles, proper planning for risk mitigation needs to be done before the implementation process. To get there, it is advisable to work with an IT consulting firm that has a deep technical background and business IT consultative acumen.

Conclusion

IT service management is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of managing IT operations for businesses in this rapid digital evolution. Efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and risk minimization are the top benefits of working with a managed IT services provider. It solves the problem of labor shortage as it can instantly deliver the people, processes, and technology needed for successful business IT operations.

If your organization needs help with optimizing your IT services and management strategy, reach out to Wipro’s IT support services to get started!

Rupali Gupta

Rupali Gupta is a blogger and professional writer who loves to write about technology and entertainment. Techzimo is one of her successful websites filled with great tech news, Know more about her on Youtube Facebook Twitter Linkedin Instagram