Some other potential conflicts that you’ll need to be aware of when prioritizing your improvement activity are:
• Only improving what’s already performing well. It might be easier to do, but it’s not likely to deliver as much benefit as tackling a problem boldly with something new. An example of this is continuing to improve mature incident management capabilities while completely ignoring the opportunities to improve problem management.
• Being aware that improving a weakness might also weaken a strength. The above example can also be viewed as this – where reducing what’s seen as an overly-expensive ticket-handling cost potentially reduces customer satisfaction and/or increases the level of employee lost productivity.
• Being mindful that a balance is needed across improvements. Try not to focus on one improvement at the expense of others.
The most important factor to consider across all of these is whether your improvements will make the greatest difference in terms of being “better, faster, cheaper” from a business perspective.
In addition, when considering self-service, knowledge management, automation and AI for transforming your IT service desk, these ITSM capabilities also need to be viewed in this context. Because while they’re applicable to many organizations, you’ll need to ensure that there aren’t other challenges and opportunities that need to be prioritized ahead of them.
Driving IT Service Desk Improvement
Through Self-Service
There are many benefits of IT self-service. Self-service is an extra access and communication
channel for IT support and it can enable improvements across all three of “better, faster,
and cheaper,” such as:
• 24x7 support availability
• A better employee experience (and lower
levels of employee lost productivity)
• Quicker issue resolution and service provision
• Lower issue and request handling costs versus
Level 1 support via the IT service desk
in many ways, the power of self-service looks
too good to be true, with so many upsides.
However, the benefits of your self-service
capabilities will be significant only if they’re
designed and delivered in a way that
employees want to use them.
The improvement might meet the need for faster, but it doesn’t necessarily meet the need for better.