Adopting A Mature IT Service Management Approach

March 8, 2021

To succeed in maturing your organization’s approach to IT Service Management (ITSM), you must bring together three key elements: people, processes and technology. Without any one of these, your attempts to scale and improve your service management delivery will fail. Cornell University is a great example of how you can optimize processes and bring in an enabling technology to get you there.

Taking IT Service to the Next Level at Cornell

At Cornell University, Central IT staff were eager to move ahead with initiative to mature their IT offerings. This included plans to better enable self-service for students, faculty and staff, as well as use key performance indicators to improve their operations. However, they were running into an issue – the IT Service Management software they were using was holding them back.

Without the proper IT service management tool in place, it can be hard for organizations to achieve true ITSM maturity. That’s why it’s so important to make sure the ITSM system you chose is flexible enough to help you achieve both your short-term and long-term goals.

So what did Cornell do? They selected a new ITSM system that fit their needs.

“Our old tool had very sophisticated reporting, but you almost needed programming experience to be able to use it,” said Todd Maniscalco, assistant director for customer service and support within Cornell’s Central IT division. As a result, team members had to spend a lot of time building and scheduling reports that provided the kind of insight that leaders wanted.

The university also didn’t have an easy way to create self-service portals for students, faculty, and staff. Central IT maintained a knowledge base within Drupal, an open-source content management system, but there was no easy way to manage this information.

The university was looking for an IT and enterprise service management platform that was simple to use and included robust self-service capabilities that would allow IT staff to take customer service to a new level of maturity. That’s how they found TeamDynamix.

TeamDynamix has quickly become an indispensable tool for driving greater IT maturity campus-wide, which was a major goal behind adopting the system.

To succeed in maturing your organization’s approach to IT Service Management (ITSM), you must bring together three key elements: people, processes and technology.

Finding the Right IT Service Management Tool

When trying to find the right ITSM solution for your organization it’s important to look at the platform as a core piece of your overall strategy – you need it to be able to grow and support things like Enterprise Service Management, self-service portals, etc. preferably without the need to code. You want to enable your citizen developers (those technically minded people outside of IT) across your organization in placed like HR and Marketing to be able to pick up this IT Service Management tool and spin up their own portals and workflows with automation.

Here are the key features and functionalities to look for when selection a new ITSM system:

Incident and problem tracking – when you run a service desk you need to have fast routing and the ability to group tickets for both incidents and problems. Doing so will allow you to properly communicate and be transparent throughout your organization.
Service portal and knowledge base – Did you know a support call can as much as $22 (according to HDI), while self-service is just $2 per incident? It’s a recommended best practice to build out a solid knowledge base and service portal so customers can resolve their own issues instead of taking up you IT help desk’s valuable time with requests like “how do I change my password.”
Workflow automation – Your teams should be focusing their efforts on your organization’s highest priorities. By setting up automations for mundane, manual or error-prone activities they can do just that.
Asset management and discovery – Make sure you can identify and track assets, plan for changes and respond to issues with an understanding of CI configuration history, blackout and maintenance windows and impact maps.
Change management – The majority (nearly 80 percent!) of issues reported to IT are the result of poor change and release management. Make sure your tool allows you to properly organize and manage plans, execution and communication for new functionality and maintaining the continuity of existing services.
Dashboards and reports – Great ITSM dashboards and reports give you the key metrics needed to make confident decisions, helping you to identify issues before they become problems, support key meetings, profiling trends and communicating the value IT provides to your entire organization.

Are you interested in getting more tips on ITSM and improving your IT maturity? You can download this free white paper from CIO.com and TeamDynamix, that explores industry best practices and the five pillars of ITSM maturity.

To read more about Cornell University’s experience improving their IT maturity with TeamDynamix visit: Customer Spotlight – Cornell University

IT Service Management Vendor Rankings

Enterprise Integration Playbook:

TeamDynamix was recognized as an ‘Honorable Mention’ in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management (ITSM)

TeamDynamix Partership Program

TeamDynamix Ranked 1st by Info Tech

Adopting A Mature IT Service Management Approach

Taking IT Service to the Next Level at Cornell

To succeed in maturing your organization’s approach to IT Service Management (ITSM), you must bring together three key elements: people, processes and technology.

Finding the Right IT Service Management Tool

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