It’s been a challenging few years for organisations, even more so for those who haven’t invested in the cloud. The flexibility and control provided by unifying your IT services and operations under one platform have become an essential ingredient to sustained success and improved resilience.
The way we work has changed. Forever. Whilst the coronavirus pandemic is widely associated with making digital transformation a reality, in truth, it simply accelerated what was a growing movement to a more fluid way of doing business.
Many forward-thinking organisations were already looking into how cloud solutions could help them modernise when the pandemic arrived. When it did, the difference between those who had made the jump and those who hadn’t quickly became apparent.
A 2021 IDC survey discovered that organisations that had invested in cloud technology drove 75% more business success, even at the height of the pandemic.
Why? Because whilst many organisations found themselves shackled by legacy on-premises architecture, those who had embraced the cloud had the ability to adapt – and even improve – how they were operating to come out the other side not just surviving, but thriving.
Platforms such as ServiceNow were essential to achieving this success. By having a single solution to unite both IT services and operations, organisations using ServiceNow had the flexibility and control necessary to remain resilient against huge change.
In this blog, we’ll explore how you can achieve this same resilience for your organisation by combining ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) products.
ITSM + ITOM: The building blocks of better resilience
There’s a danger in looking at services and operations as separate entities. Whilst this may have historically been the approach, it can give a false impression of how your organisation is performing.
For the average enterprise, approximately 60% of incidents are generated by machines (services, devices, storage, routers, etc.). If you can’t join the dots between service-related tickets and operational issues, you’ll always be on the back foot, reactively fire-fighting to identify issues and manually resolve them.
By widening your IT management to include both these ‘machine’ elements and the ‘people’ service elements, you’ll be able to reduce high-priority incidents and outages, as well as shorten service restoration times – saving thousands of work hours in the process.
By combining ITSM and ITOM, you can transform how you operate to be more efficient AND gain the agility to keep moving forward regardless of what the world throws at you.
Let’s look at how you can enable this resilience with your service and operational IT working in harmony.
Create a common data model on a single platform
With all the various devices, services and solutions operating in your network, gaining a clear understanding of the relationships between your IT resources and IT services is essential. Without it, you’ll just be guessing and key opportunities – and threats – will be missed.
With ITSM and ITOM, you can establish a standardised data model using ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model. This adds much-needed consistency, context and understanding to the volume of data coming out of your environment – making sure the alerts that matter aren’t lost amongst the noise.
With a consistent data model in place, ServiceNow’s AI can do a lot of the legwork for you, drawing meaningful connections from historical incident, problem and change data to dramatically speed up the resolution process. This enables you to catch and resolve issues proactively, rather than discover them once an incident has been raised.
For example:
- ITOM can identify issues unfolding in real-time across your network.
- It can then ping a warning to your service delivery team that a potential incident will occur before a user raises a ticket.
- Your agents can then utilise automated workflows that span ITSM and ITOM to quickly remediate the issue without it ever impacting your users.
In today’s market, speed and efficiency are the name of the game – and integrated IT is a must-have to keep up.
Proactively improve services and empower your people
The key to a proactive IT approach is visibility. If you don’t know what you’ve got where or how it’s impacting your environment, you can’t make sensible decisions on how to improve.
With ITOM’s service mapping capabilities, you can quickly discover your IT resources, both on-premises and in the cloud, and view them in context alongside your IT services.
This helps visually establish the various dependencies that exist in your environment. That way, you can easily trace the effect of issues and changes and forecast the potential impact of future changes.
This gives you near real-time visibility into the true operational state of your services and enables you to prioritise remediation based on priority.
To complement ITOM’s visibility, ITSM features Predictive Intelligence to automate the assignment of an issue to the relevant resolution group. Using a simple description of the issue, Predictive Intelligence can draw from months of previous incidents to accurately categorise, prioritise, and assign it to the right team.
This helps eliminate human error and accelerates your mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). Once that ticket has been assigned, ServiceNow’s AI can assist the process further by providing your live agents with suggested remediation actions and workflows that can be enabled with a single click.
ITSM self-service
All of that incident knowledge and learning gets pooled in a shared knowledge base. This empowers your agents to solve tickets more efficiently but also unlocks rich, intelligent responses for staff using ITSM’s self-service capabilities.
By enabling self-service, you can potentially resolve over 50% of employee-generated tickets before they even reach your service desk.
By pairing the visibility from ITOM with the intelligent services in ITSM, you can reduce incidents, eliminate outages, improve the user experience and increase productivity – all whilst reducing the incurred costs of manual processes and investigations.
Analyse, enhance and innovate with Performance Analytics
Once you’ve unified your operational and service IT on one platform, you should be operating efficiently to proactively solve issues and deliver a much-improved service to both your people, customers or citizens.
This is a great place to be and you’ll be well prepared to adapt to any unforeseen challenges that come your way (if they’re IT-related they won’t be unforeseen for long!). You’ll have a strong IT foundation that can support your organisation's goals – but why stop there?
Now you’ve got a consistent data layer and mapped it against your service and operational information, it’s time to use those insights to drive your organisation forward.
ITSM Pro features Performance Analytics, which will help you make smart decisions, driven by real-time data, at scale. Presented in easy-to-understand graphs and reports, you can instantly identify opportunities for improvement, allowing you to adjust resources based on usage, cut out unnecessary or underused assets, as well as validate performance metrics against key goals.
These smart metrics can help reduce critical incident resolution times by 60% – freeing you and your IT team to focus on new innovation projects and look at plans for growth, instead of just staying afloat.
It’s time to future-proof your success
As digital transformation moves from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’, the visibility, context, and control ITSM and ITOM provide are crucial to staying competitive and future-ready.
The pandemic exposed a key advantage for organisations that have unified their IT services and operations under one cloud platform. By being able to operate efficiently, faster, deliver a better service, and achieve greater agility and resilience – there’s no time like the present to start using ServiceNow to future-proof your success.
Key takeaways
- Integrating your IT operations and services is essential to maintaining your organisation's resilience.
- By combining ITSM and ITOM, you can establish a common data model that unlocks powerful automation capabilities to drastically reduce resolution time.
- ITOM’s service mapping feature helps you visually understand the relationships and dependencies between your IT ‘things’ and your IT services.
- Armed with that insight, you can proactively predict and prevent issues as well as identify opportunities for innovation and growth.
