Long regarded as the set of practices and solutions for ensuring that technology is best meeting the needs of users, the IT Service Management function now serves as the vehicle that will deliver value in today’s emerging digital enterprise.
A recent Forbes Insights report, “Delivering Value to Today’s Digital Enterprise: The State of IT Service Management, 2017,” sponsored by BMC, investigates this development. The report is based on a survey of 261 executives around the world—IT leaders in large organizations—and examines the evolving role of IT Service Management. The research maps ITSM progress against a maturity model that looks at its progression from IT department enabler to digital catalyst. The ITSM maturity curve finds that the vast majority of ITSM efforts have moved beyond a focus on IT-centric services, and are positioning a service culture to advance its business in the digital economy.
Key findings include:
• Most executives agree the IT landscape is changing dramatically, and it’s hard to keep up with the needed skills to support it. A majority, 56%, say the pace of IT change or transformation is accelerating “significantly” or close to significantly. Skills shortages are the greatest challenge in aligning IT to business services. Deficient IT skills tops the list of challenges to achieving this, cited by 36%.
• Many organizations still spend most of their IT budgets—and a good deal of staff time—keeping the lights on. Thirty-seven percent of survey respondents report that the majority of their IT budgets go to ongoing maintenance and management. Close to half of executives, 47%, indicate they are responding to the challenge of budget and resources going into maintenance and management by turning to cloud-based services.
• Lack of a Service Management approach is hurting competitiveness as a business. Three out of four executives agree that the amount of time, money and resources spent on ongoing maintenance and management—versus new project development or new initiatives—is affecting the overall competitiveness of their organizations.
• ITSM plays a crucial role in key digital enterprise initiatives. A majority of executives, 56%, indicate that ITSM is either “extremely important” or close to extremely important in their enterprises’ cloud computing efforts, as well as in big data initiatives. Fifty-four percent also indicate that ITSM is “extremely important” or close to it in supporting their mobile computing efforts. The ITSM function’s greatest contributions to digital transformation efforts are through transparency and productivity.
• IT Service Management activities are still fragmented within most enterprises. When asked which most closely describes the state of their ITSM efforts as they relate to the business, 37% of executives indicate their “ITSM effort is mainly focused on delivering IT services at this time,” and 41% report their “ITSM effort is aligned with the requirements of selected business units.”
• Service Management isn’t just for IT. As digitization spreads across enterprises, it serves the needs of all departments. Service Management has expanded to represent new ways of thinking about how systems can be provisioned and made available when and where they are needed across enterprises. Two-thirds report their ITSM budgets have grown over the past three years. The benefits of a holistic Service Management strategy are under- stood outside of IT. A majority, 52%, indicate that these benefits are “well understood” or close to being well understood.
• Improving operational efficiency and employee productivity are the most important business drivers of ITSM efforts. More than two in five respondents, 43%, say improving operational efficiency is the goal of their ITSM efforts. Cost savings and increased productivity are the leading benefits of a solid ITSM approach. More than two in five executives, 42%, report they are seeing cost savings in their business processes. Advanced ITSM sites are far more likely to have seen such benefits—49% of advanced sites have achieved cost savings, versus 28% of their less developed counterparts.
IT Service Management still tends to be fragmented but is expanding its role as an enabler of the digital initiatives that are delivering competitive advantage. Customer satisfaction, employee productivity and operational efficiency are benefits forward-looking organizations are realizing as a result of more expansive ITSM engagements.
