Information Technology

Service Management – why is it important for agile organizations

By May 14, 2016 No Comments

What is Service Management?
Every company is in the business of ‘servicing’ it’s customers ie. The goods or service it offers is beneficial to its clients in some ways. If there is an issue or a problem with the goods or service, the client has received the best of the breed company have some sort of a feedback loop to quickly recognize the problem (or it’s root cause) take corrective action and then provide the corrected version back to the customer who may have received defective product or service.
If organizations don’t do this, the customers will go to competitors and its customer base starts to erode dooming the organization. So the service that any company provides need to be an engaging and well managed one. This goes to high volume manufactures of goods or service organizations including governmental agencies (who wouldn’t love if they can be efficient in delivery of their services) and non-profits. Stakeholders especially in service organizations like tax-payers and donors demand higher value for their dollars.

How does Service Management work, ideally?
If there is an issue and a customer calls in, whether it is a problem or they simply need some information, employees start scurrying around to solve the issue. It could be weather to know the status of their permit application, or if they are inquiring to buy a car. It’s a very people-based business, with everyone running around to service these requests. These requests need to be manageable, i.e. they need to be structured, routed to appropriate person and aggregated. If we can put it into a database, and aggregate the requests, know what works and what does not and use the knowledge base, run reports and analytics – that would make the whole service management that much more effective. By having data on what types of requests that are coming in and exactly what solutions have worked, it makes the whole service delivery transparent. Remember what can’t be measured cannot be managed. ServiceNow is a software package that is a market leader in the service management space.
A ServiceNow help desk ticket management system that records the type of requests and source gives an insight to management on the customer’s current needs and by servicing exactly what customer needs will be the driver for its growth. It is not only important to provide great service or product but to find out proactively what are all the flaws that its offerings may have. Companies customer base is the best source to pointing out those flaws. High growth organizations a way to recognize the root cause and eliminate those root cause for customer complaints. ServiceNow allows a structured process and workflow to ensure that all stakeholders in company can look at the same structured data in a transparent and come to same conclusion on the nature of the problem and more importantly the appropriate solution.

Why is Information Technology (IT) department the driver of this change?
Information Technology Departments in past (and currently in many companies as well) have been just deluged by requests that are simply serviced as they come in. This meant IT responded to these requests very slow or not at all in some cases. Most organizations thought (some backward looking organizations still think) IT as a cost center. High growth companies now recognize that technology can transform their organizations (eg. E-commerce, social media marketing, etc). It made imperative for IT to raise up to the expectations of rest of the business and CEOs of companies started to see IT as a transformation center. IT had to find better ways to deliver service requests from both its internal customers like HR, Finance etc. and external customers, as well. Of course being technology-savvy, IT sees the value in software package like ServiceNow and more clearly understand structured and streamlined approach to service management.
In fact, in many organizations IT has bought the notion of streamlined service management to the broader enterprise. Other departments like HR, Finance, purchasing have begun to adopt ServiceNow tool. For example, ServiceNow is used for Supply Chain Management in large retail companies. Buyers in these companies were communicating with email and spreadsheets with their vendors, stores and distribution centers on a continuous basis. If there was a shortage of a particular item at a particular time, the store manager could see them available at other store or distribution center and arrange them to be delivered before the store run-out of the item. So every store had the ability to constantly and appropriately stock items, ending up making the retailer more profitable. ServiceNow brings abstraction and agility. Service management solution like ServiceNow is becoming more critical to mid-sized and large organizations to be able to provide high levels of customer service and expand customer base that in turn drives their high rate of growth