For many IT leaders, the ever-evolving landscape of technology presents a unique set of challenges. One of the biggest service management concerns is how to streamline processes, improve communication between various teams and ensure resources are properly managed so projects can be completed on time and within budget.
Additionally, there needs to be an efficient system for monitoring incidents or tickets so any issues can be quickly resolved. This is where digital transformation plays an integral role in helping IT leaders make sense of it all.
Digital transformation is the process of leveraging technology to improve organizational processes and increase efficiency levels. It involves re-engineering traditional business infrastructure by utilizing digital resources to create new value models based on data-driven insights. For IT leaders, this means having access to real-time information on their team’s tasks and activities to better align operations with company objectives and goals.
Many IT departments are starting to implement codeless IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms to enable an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) approach to service delivery. Companies like TeamDynamix offer ITSM/ESM combined with Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and enterprise integration and automation (iPaaS) – all on a single, codeless platform.
This approach enables businesses and organizations to integrate all their systems into a single hub for better security and governance; improves interdepartmental communication and transparency; and empowers technical users in all departments to automate repetitive tasks and processes that can often be time-consuming.
Enabling Better Self-Service
One way that businesses can make use of digital transformation is by deploying self-service portals for IT services such as help desk support. This allows employees (and/or customers) to resolve their own technical issues without relying on a dedicated help desk staff; a move which will save precious time and money while also reducing resource drain from IT service desks.
Self-service also helps ensure fast resolution when dealing with customer issues, thereby boosting overall customer satisfaction rates by providing more personalized service options that fit individual needs better than having to put in a ticket or email or call on traditional help desks for support.
Having a customizable and easy-to-use service portal has been a game changer for Ellsworth Adhesives, a global corporation that supplies a wide range of adhesives, sealants, lubricants, coatings, encapsulants, tapes, soldering products, surface preparations, specialty chemicals and dispensing equipment.
Within the IT department, the help desk used to receive about 80 percent of service requests through email, 15 percent through phone calls and walkups and only 5 percent through the service portal. Now, 95 percent of requests come through the portal, 5 percent come through walkups, and the help desk team no longer accepts email requests.
To make it as easy as possible for people to use the service portal, the IT department created an app that opens the portal automatically on employees’ desktops.
“We were getting 80 to 90 service requests per day, and the help desk team couldn’t filter and rout them all quickly enough,” Adam Crichlow, IT service desk manager, said. With the portal, however, this all happens automatically. This shift alone has cut the time it takes from creating to resolving a service ticket nearly in half.
Using TeamDynamix “has freed up staff time right away,” Crichlow said—a benefit the company realized “almost on day one” of using the system.
As other departments have seen the efficiencies that TeamDynamix has created, they’ve also adopted the ESM system. The latest department to create its own service portal using the platform is the Environmental Health and Safety team, which never used the old ticketing system for service management before.
Improving Communication
Digital transformation also brings improvements in communication between teams working towards a common goal, as it allows for an easier exchange of project data both internally and externally. Through powerful collaboration tools embedded within your ITSM, team members can keep each other informed about tasks without having to resort to email chains or other manual methods which take longer to complete than desired.
In addition, communication and alerts to different tasks and status updates can be automated through the use of iPaaS so every stakeholder involved in a project or issue is on the same page and has all the necessary information needed to make decisions.
A highly flexible platform for managing IT and enterprise service tickets, projects, assets and changes, TeamDynamix allows users to create their own unique service categories and build automated workflows for managing multistep processes without any knowledge of coding required.
With TeamDynamix, Crichlow and his team at Ellsworth Adhesives have easily created customized online service catalogs and dynamic forms for collecting information from users about the nature of their service requests. The information collected during this process allows for tickets to be routed automatically to the appropriate staff members for resolution, without burdening help desk staff with this responsibility.
It’s a similar story at MarketLab, a Michigan-based company that provides medical supplies to hospitals and healthcare facilities. With TeamDynamix in place, the team has transformed their delivery of IT services. For instance, service tickets can be generated from email requests automatically. Enterprise Systems Engineer Brendan Lesinski calls this auto-creation feature “brilliant,” adding: “It has resulted in significantly less lost work.”
Better Reporting and Transparency
Finally, digital transformation initiatives can result in significant visibility into task progress for reporting purposes – something that can easily become a challenge when tracking complex projects across multiple departments or stakeholders.
By leveraging an ITSM tool with PPM baked in, you get better access to dashboards or automated reports that provide real-time insights into task statuses across the organization. This means managers have greater control over operations while being able to detect any potential risks before they become too overwhelming for their teams to handle efficiently.
Here, resource capacity planning can make a big difference and help to stem resource drain across an organization. By having more transparency into who is doing the work and when companies can better prioritize projects and meet the needs of their employees and customer base.
Another big improvement the MarketLab team has experienced since the switch to TeamDynamix is the ability to run reports and view IT service data on the fly.
Before, if IT leaders wanted to know how many service requests they’ve had for a particular system, they had to write a query within the SQL database. This was a very time-consuming process, and as a result, it seldom happened.
“In most 8-hour days, you just don’t have the 45 minutes needed to do that – it’s not a difficult process per se, but it’s very tedious and takes time I don’t have,” Lesinski explained.
With TeamDynamix, these kinds of reports can be generated in a matter of seconds, making them much more likely to occur. As a result, IT leaders are improving their decision-making by using real-time, actionable data to identify key areas of need and advocate for the appropriate resources to address them.
“With TeamDynamix, if you have an idea around data and want to pull a report to see what you need, it’s just there – you have the charts and graphs or the hard numbers if you need them,” Lesinski said.
The insights that IT leaders are gaining from using TeamDynamix enable them to recognize patterns and identify the root cause of problems, instead of having to fix the same issues over and over. This big-picture view allows them to be more strategic while also providing improved service outcomes.
For example, MarketLab’s IT department had been receiving many service requests related to the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. However, after implementing TeamDynamix, Lesinski and his colleagues realized that more than half of those requests were linked to a single screen.
“Just by stabilizing this one screen, we were able to greatly reduce the number of problems our employees were experiencing,” he said. This, in turn, also reduced the number of tickets the IT service desk received.
As technology advances at breakneck speed, staying ahead of the curve is increasingly important for organizations wishing to remain competitive in their industries.
With digital transformation now playing an increasingly vital role in modern businesses and organizations, it’s clear that becoming knowledgeable about its various benefits should be a top priority both for IT leaders looking after their teams’ performance as well as executives trying to maximize profits via more effective approaches towards managing complex operations.
Want to learn more about digital transformation? Check out: Integration and Automation: Keys to Achieving Digital Transformation