Since companies evolve at a considerably high rate, they need those in charge of their IT to understand and anticipate their every need, which means keeping up with the evolution. This is only achievable if both their business and information technology sections speak the same language and develop mature relationships that are based on collaboration and mutual trust. Ensuring you expand your traditional IT service management enough to build credibility with your customers, deliver excellence, and get the various units of your business to open up about their requirements is the only way forward.
Bringing your IT service management to excellence requires a strategy that involves enhanced and solidified service level management, well-implemented service portfolio management, and adopting continual service improvement through implementation of service reporting and CSI mechanisms.
Service portfolio management
IT organizations often overlook service portfolio management. The short-term results of implemented IT service management can be blinding to the extent that organizations forget their issues and priorities. As a result, they end up losing the urge for further investments. While companies become more effective from an operational point of view, the relationship between business units and IT stays the same. The absence of service portfolio management keeps the IT organization from developing trust with the business.
Service level management
To manage the expectations of your customers, service level management ought to cover technical, end-user, business, and professional services such as business analysis and project management. Your IT needs to turn its collaborations with business units into operational machines that function independently to provide ideal levels. Service reviews, catalogs, and metrics are necessary in such a case. Because they have not built and expressed comprehensive service level agreements, many companies fear they won’t meet the expectations of their clients or their own promises. Instead, they choose to convey their targets in ambiguous ways and risk their relationship with customers. Lack of clarity and ambiguity in service level goals is bound to result in mismanaged expectations and an atmosphere of mistrust.
If you are unsure about how to improve or implement service level management, apply measurement criteria for future benchmarking even if it is still too early to set precise targets. You will be better placed to set attainable service levels after a few trial months of analyzed results and encouragement to dialogue with the customer.
Service reporting
Apart from ensuring you are always aware of your company’s challenges and progress, service reporting also allows you to know what you are getting from your IT. Communications between businesses and IT service providers often fail since IT professionals are known to use extremely technical terminology in reports. This technicality might mask underlying issues if IT professionals lack the time or desire to understand the meaning of such reports comprehensively. Because it often leads to failed relationships, this protective mechanism might cost IT service providers their customer’s trust. Consulting with your client in an open manner and agreeing what the reports ought to look like, contain, and their interpretation is recommended.