
The 5 Key Use Cases of iPaaS Explained
Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, is no longer just a buzzword in the tech industry. It’s a vital tool that enables organizations across
The Info-Tech ranking report offers a unique view of the market based entirely on in-depth customer interviews. Download the Info-Tech ITSM Quadrant and Customer Viewpoint report today.
We’ll show you some of our best situations and show you exactly how to execute them to get immediate results. The best part is, iPaaS tools often feature easy-to-use click and drag functionality, meaning you don’t need a dedicated employee building integrations and workflows.
System Integrators, Value Added Resellers, Technology Providers, and Buying Consortiums can benefit from a partnership with TeamDynamix.
The Info-Tech ranking report offers a unique view of the market based entirely on in-depth customer interviews. Download the Info-Tech ITSM Quadrant and Customer Viewpoint report to gain a better understanding of key vendor strengths and emerging market requirements.
Investing in IT Service Management (ITSM) software is a great step toward increased efficiency, lower costs, saved time and higher customer/end-user satisfaction. Before deciding to purchase ITSM software, there are a few things you should consider as well as information you should know, so that when it comes time to implement the platform you are prepared and ready for it to take off.
When selecting an ITSM tool, there are several key factors that people should keep in mind so that they choose the best option for their organization’s specific needs:
Common challenges that teams encounter with IT Service Management include organizing work, managing resources, developing a service portal and dealing with end-user self-service adoption. However, a very crucial challenge to note that’s not discussed as often is the difficulty that comes from obtaining buy-in to implement an ITSM platform.
Companies always have lots going on, meaning there isn’t ever a perfect time to implement something like new ITSM software. So, making sure that your employees will utilize new software and take advantage of all that it has to offer is not an easy task. Changing people’s behavior isn’t something you can do in a day, especially when they are so used to an old way of doing things. However, it is important to make sure you find ways to get everyone on board because once they are, the benefits will come pouring in.
The main reason why IT leaders find it challenging to obtain buy-in from employees is that there is a general lack of understanding about what ITSM truly is.
Educating people on the world of IT Service Management and the benefits of better service delivery will push them to be more interested in all the things they can do within an ITSM platform.
It’s important to highlight things like the amount of time they can save if more tasks are automated, or if people can solve their own issues using a self-service portal and knowledge base. By showing how they can benefit from the new software, they are more likely to be willing to take advantage of ITSM.
And that’s exactly what Pima County is doing. While the county’s digital transformation journey is starting in IT, there are plans to expand the use of TeamDynamix outside of IT for true Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”
It’s that success that IT is starting to realize with ITSM and iPaaS from TeamDynamix, “We’ve been able to use our success to drive additional headcount in our organization, to do more and better things,” Hayes said.
“As we being to do automation via workflows it’s only going to make it better,” he concluded. “We’re lucky in that our leadership understands that as the world has changed, IT has become the center of everything. They know that the more they invest in us, the more they can reap benefits and savings in other places.
When it comes to finding the right ITSM software for your organization, there are specific features and functionality you should look for, including:
When IT leaders were asked what areas they want to focus on in order to reduce the drain on IT resources and budgets, the following information was gathered:
A one-platform approach for IT Service Management and your Project Portfolio Management (PPM) makes the most sense. Within organizations, there are resources and people that work on service, change management and problems, while also working on projects and operational work. It wouldn’t make sense for us to look at a resource as only being useful for one task, whether it be something service-related or project-related.
Consolidation is happening throughout organizations and using one platform for ITSM and PPM is one way to improve service delivery with limited resources.
One significant benefit of bringing the two together is resource management and capacity planning. In a typical IT department, they deal with a variety of things like incidents, service requests, projects and changes. With people working across these four work streams, capacity has to be managed very specifically in order to first, support the needs of the business through the ITSM side, but also, deliver the projects, because that’s what drives business forward.
A project, by nature, either replaces a service, fundamentally changes a service, or is a new service that is being added. So, when you think about the lifecycle of a service, PPM has a large role in it. Acting like ITSM and PPM are unrelated will cause your organization to go through unnecessary steps and lead to wasted time.
The City of Sunnyvale, CA is using a single platform approach and seeing great benefits.
“Before TeamDynamix the work was managed essentially by memory,” Dhiren Gandhi, applications and analytics manager said. Kathleen Boutte, Chief Information Officer, said the system they had in place for ticketing and managing IT assets prior to TeamDynamix was very antiquated.
“It was very difficult for us to understand where our resources were, how we were using our people. We needed better reporting, we needed visibility of staff and resource management, but we also needed better asset management,” she said. “We were managing assets on spreadsheets and different systems, if anyone asked how many PCs we have in the city it would take us a few moments to gather that information and give an answer.”
With TeamDynamix in place, Boutte said they now have all of that information and more at the click of a button.
Hema Nekkanti, project management office manager, touts the benefits of bringing IT Service Management (ITSM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) together on a single platform, “With one platform now we can actually see the tickets that are being worked on as well as the projects that are in the pipeline,” she said. “This gives us the ability to actually allocate the resources appropriately, and there’s no resource conflict.”
Eddie Soliven, infrastructure services manager, finds great value in the dashboards provided within the TeamDynamix platform. Nekkanti agrees, “The dashboards are the coolest things in TeamDynamix, I enjoy creating them as well as using them,” she said. Nekkanti said she and her team use the dashboards internally to view projects in the pipeline as well as tickets.
Because service management can become such a crucial part of an organization, it is helpful to have someone who “owns” service management. Having responsibility distributed is difficult, whereas having someone who is in charge of it allows for proper management of ITSM.
Having a service portal, a well-developed service catalog, a rich and ever-growing knowledge base, a mature service desk and a very experienced project management team with well-defined processes will also lead to great success.
When people are able to solve their own problems there are no distractions and important, more complex tasks can be taken care of. Also, a significant amount of money is saved- the average cost of a level 1 support call is $22, and the average cost of a self-service incident is $2 (according to HDI). If your service portal is easy to search and navigate, incorporates feedback from customers and is easy to build with a responsive design, it will be good to go.
If people are able to see how much success ITSM can bring to an organization, they are just going to want more. This creates a demand for Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
IT isn’t the only department in an organization that receives requests for which they need to provide answers. Integration needs to work with all tools in the ecosystem, not just the ones that are IT-specific. Although each department has different reasons for utilizing service management, they can all benefit from it in a variety of way including:
A good ITSM platform will allow you to implement ITIL constructs that make sense for your entity.
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework. It doesn’t tell you how to manage IT and it doesn’t tell you how to build an ITSM application. It only tells you what you should be doing to effectively manage IT.
Despite each organization being so different, the two methodologies of ITIL and ITSM always go hand in hand. Because of this, it would be helpful for every IT employee to be trained on ITIL. Once the knowledge is there, they can run with it.
What to read more stories from TeamDynamix customers? Check out our customer spotlights.
This article was originally published in April 2022 and has been updated with new information.
Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, is no longer just a buzzword in the tech industry. It’s a vital tool that enables organizations across
3 Non-Negotiable IT Service Management Features Over the last few years, IT Service Management (ITSM) technology has rapidly evolved to meet the demands of an ever-evolving digital
When it comes to IT, state and local governments are struggling with limited resources, retaining IT talent and low IT service desk maturity. In fact,
TeamDynamix’s award-winning SaaS cloud solution offers IT Service and Project Management together on one platform with enterprise integration and automation.
[email protected]
(877) 752-6196
Contact Us