The ITSM market
Today, companies of all sizes are dependent on technology, and must interact with IT departments in one way or another. Increasingly solicited, these departments are faced with recurring problems: lack of management and global visibility of infrastructures, poorly-qualified incidents, multitudes of tools without centralization, management of multiple tool configurations, saturated user support, etc. The complexity of the role gives rise to malfunctions that render services inefficient, increase costs and degrade satisfaction.
One of the key roles of the ITSM approach is to help infrastructure departments simplify their tasks by abstracting the complexity of IT architectures and unifying working relationships between IT teams and end-users.
What is ITSM?
IT service management, literally ITSM, for "information technology service management", is a paradigm in which corporate IT is used to deliver value-added services to customers. To achieve this, the company must put in place an organizational structure that enables it to deliver this value.As an integral part of the company, the IS department must be organized around specific processes. IT infrastructure management software has been specifically developed to address the problems encountered by companies using ITSM.
What are the main issues facing users of ITSM software?
Users are faced with a number of issues. Firstly, the tools available on the ITSM market are either comprehensive, but excessively expensive and difficult to get to grips with, or free, but feature-poor and difficult to use.
Furthermore, the explosion of the digital transition has made corporate information systems increasingly hybrid, profoundly changing the activity of IT infrastructure managers. They have to deal with a multiplicity of problems that may emanate from compartmentalized and specific information systems. The IT infrastructure manager becomes a multi-tasker, constantly having to move from one subject to another, without transition. This is detrimental to longer-term, high value-added projects that require method, reflection and concentration.
Finally, these problems are compounded by a market dynamic of cost domination in an international context. This mechanically leads to having to do more, without being able to take advantage of additional human resources.
Faced with these changes in the IT landscape, how can ITSM solutions overcome these problems to deliver ever more value-added services?
By centralizing, automating and taking account of business needs
To gain global visibility of IT department efficiency, there are platforms that unify and centralize information, software, users and processes, making it possible to manage the configurations of all these elements, as well as modifications, incidents and user requests.
Diagnostic interpretation of these tools should highlight areas for improvement. This data must be accessible to all company managers, so that everyone can take responsibility.
On the other hand, some ITSM software packages offer the opportunity to automate certain tasks and processes.
In particular, they can help identify recurring incidents and then set up automated corrective actions. For example, they can be used to launch backup software across an entire estate at the slightest detection of cryptolocker on a machine; or to eliminate recurring interventions, which are painful for both IT departments and customers, by automating the restart of service on a machine if the service goes down, or the deletion of temporary local files if the disk is full.
This frees up CIOs' time, allowing them to concentrate on other projects or customers.
This more intelligible global vision will enable each IS department to regain control of its processes, and redirect resources to high-ROI projects requiring greater potential for innovation.
Through an agile, innovative cloud offering
Software solutions must adapt to the company's business processes, not the other way round. Service scalability and maintenance are at the heart of today's CIO issues, and to meet these needs effectively, solutions need to be agile, regularly adding new functionalities.
Indeed, an agile organization is more responsive, adaptable and innovative than traditional Taylorist ones. Placed at the heart of tool evolution, IS teams are more autonomous and reap the benefits of a solution that is adapted to their context and meets their needs.
IT managers need to be able to focus on their core business, providing fast and accurate support to their users, rather than spending their time administering and maintaining their ITSM software.
By equipping yourself with a solution whose agile and cloud-based approaches are at the heart of its development philosophy, maintenance requirements become virtually non-existent (little initial configuration, instant start-up, ease of use, online support, etc.).
Gartner estimates that over the next five years, half of all businesses will use the cloud to manage their IT services.
Other expected functions
- Real-time supervision ;
- Automated incident resolution workflows ;
- Alerting ;
- Software update management and deployment;
- Fleet inventory;
- Ticketing.
Future trends
Future trends in the ITSM market include a growing need for automation.
With a view to moving from a reactive to a proactive approach, ITSM solutions will have to integrate machine learning into their solutions. This will enable the software to adapt itself to the specificities and diversity of each customer's IS systems, to avoid false positives and to take action in order to ensure an ever more available and efficient IS service for these users.
Another market trend is " End-User Analytics ". This involves analyzing user behavior on machines and software, to ensure service availability for each user. For example, a machine could be automatically detected for its usage, and therefore benefit from specific attention (software updates, port opening, access to web services, etc.). This finesse will also enable better identification of faults, so as to get to the source of problems more quickly by analyzing a virtual network diagram. The aim? Guarantee the best possible IT experience and full customer satisfaction.
Finally, the MDM ( Mobile Device Management ) trend will continue to shape the market. This will enable the management of mobile devices, whether smartphones, tablets or hybrid computers.
Careful implementation
Choosing the right ITSM software solution requires the involvement of all stakeholders , from the IT department to support technicians, as well as users and general management.
The choice of service provider or software publisher will also be crucial. It's important to choose a partner who will provide seamless support, and whose solution is recognized for its ease of implementation.
Finally, the key to the success of a project of this type lies in upstream change management and communication around the project. This will involve, for example, the organization of regular meetings on :
- end-user familiarization with the product ;
- product rebilling by IS ;
- CIOs' organizational reflections to produce statistics relating to their departments, etc.
Article translated from French