This piece on ITSM benefits is part of a series of IT service management (ITSM) articles that aims to share a lot of helpful ITSM information quickly, i.e. it has been created for time-strapped ITSM professionals to provide a rapid overview of the available ITSM benefits to any organization that’s considering applying IT service delivery and support best practices.
It’s not definitive, and there will undoubtedly be additional ITSM benefits that could be added. Please feel free to add other ITSM benefits in the comments section below.
This article by @SophieDanby shares the types of benefits your organization could reap from #ITSM. Share on XThe high-level ITSM benefits
There are many available ITSM benefits, but as with any benefits, an organization’s ability to reap them will depend on how well they adopt ITSM best practices. These ITSM benefits include:
- Better alignment with business goals, which helps ensure that IT activities directly support business needs and improve business performance
- Improved IT service delivery that’s more efficient, reliable, and predictable, with focused and standardized processes resulting in fewer issues and errors and reduced downtime
- Increased efficiency – through process standardization, automation, and ITSM tools
- Reduced costs – by improving efficiency, ITSM can help an organization reduce the cost of delivering IT services, especially through better resource management and increased automation
- Better decision-making thanks to the collection and analysis of IT service delivery and support data
- Improved risk management, with ITSM helping organizations identify and manage the risks associated with their IT services, including security, compliance, and service continuity risks
- Increased customer satisfaction by improving the reliability and quality of IT services and technology-enabled features such as self-service portals and service catalogs can improve the end-user experience.
Lower-level ITSM benefits
In terms of lower-level ITSM benefits, ITSM-driven quality of service improvements could result in the following benefits:
- Increased availability of IT and business services thanks to fewer and better-managed incidents
- Reduced risk of change-related disruptions and the adverse effects on services through improved change management capabilities
- Increased business productivity thanks to higher IT service availability and quicker restoration of service through formalized incident handling
- Improved employee experiences with IT service delivery and IT support
- Reduced IT wastage thanks to a better understanding and management of IT assets and services
- Compliance in terms of both internal and external risk management requirements.
How ITSM can save your organization money
While improved efficiency and quality are valuable ITSM benefits, many organizations will also seek cost reductions. These ITSM benefits can come in various forms, including:
- That ITSM best practices and fit-for-purpose ITSM tools can provide optimized process workflows and automation that minimize the reliance on labor and the associated costs.
- More-focused use of the available IT people – making them more productive and potentially more motivated.
- Allowing IT support personnel to know which IT issues need to be prioritized because they have the most significant business impact.
- Saving time and money through knowledge management, e.g. reusing incident-based knowledge to reduce incident resolution times and the end-user and business impact.
- Downtime reduction through the ITSM benefits of incident, problem, and availability management, in particular.
- Preventative actions that avoid business-affecting issues before they occur (through problem and capacity management).
- Using major incident management and IT service continuity best practices to resume operations after critical, operations-affecting IT issues.
- Reducing, potentially eliminating, the duplication of effort found within informal operations – saving time and unnecessary costs.
- Using IT asset, configuration, and capacity management best practices to ensure new IT spending is absolutely essential.
- Preventing change or inconsistency-based wastage and the associated costs of “reworking.”
There are many more ways in which ITSM will help your organization, but hopefully, this brief ITSM benefits article has been helpful. More on ITSM can be read in this “What is ITSM?” article.
Further Reading
Please use the website search capability to find other helpful ITSM articles on topics such as product or service design, cost-effective IT support, customer experience, knowledge bases, improving IT products and services, ITIL for small businesses, managing mobile devices, real-time performance measurement, developing team members, customer service, and attracting potential customers.
Sophie Danby
Sophie is a freelance ITSM marketing consultant, helping ITSM solution vendors to develop and implement effective marketing strategies.
She covers both traditional areas of marketing (such as advertising, trade shows, and events) and digital marketing (such as video, social media, and email marketing). She is also a trained editor.
