If you work in IT, you’ll be forgiven for wondering how you’re going to tackle a growing backlog of project requests and how to prioritize them. You’ll no doubt have invested in many ITSM tools over time. But this growing mix of ticketing tools, workflow management systems, call logging forms, systems monitoring tools, software asset management (SAM) tools, home-grown, traditional ITSM solutions, and more, can be part of the problem.
These tools are great at doing the job they’re meant for, but their focus is narrow. Take ticketing systems – they’re good for teams following a process to manage requests and resolve issues. But ITSM tools lack the robust set of capabilities needed to execute IT infrastructure programs successfully from start to finish. You need a platform that orchestrates all your data, systems, and workflows.
At the start of any IT program, you want to understand how the change you are making will affect your entire estate. You can use your systems monitoring tools, IT discovery tools and more to collect information about users, systems, and applications. However, aggregating, cleaning and normalizing this information and connecting the dots to understand complex project dependencies will be manual and prone to errors. These errors carry significant risks including business disruption that can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue.
For an organization with thousands of employees and endpoints, it’s going to take months for multiple team members just to aggregate and analyze data manually. Once complete it will already be out of date and contain errors. It’s going to be difficult to make fast, smart decisions as the environment changes.
Because of the lack tool interoperability, you simply can’t rely on them alone to manage IT infrastructure programs. If you do, you’ll always have to fill in the gaps manually – from data collection and analysis to planning and execution. It’s going to take too long to manage change at a time when you need to become more agile and any errors in your data will be amplified as projects progress, risking business and end user disruption.
ITSM Tools Will Never Get You Where You Need to Be
If you continue to use manual processes to bridge the gaps between your ITSM tools, you’re never going to achieve the rate of digital transformation that your leadership team expects to enable anywhere operations. More programs are heading your way and you can’t afford to continue spending months and thousands of dollars attempting to customize legacy systems to manage IT infrastructure programs.
According to the 2021 Adobe State of Work report you now also run the risk of losing talented employees. 49 percent of respondents said they will quit a job if technology is out of date or hard to use. That puts greater pressure on you to understand the best-fit technologies for meeting end users’ needs and to ensure rollouts don’t get in the way of productivity.
If end users are asking for automation, don’t you think it’s time IT adopted it too? Without automation it’s going to be hard to dynamically deliver the technologies your end users need, putting your business at risk for being eclipsed by competitors.
You need to be able to make smarter decisions about infrastructure changes and make them faster without breaking anything in the process. The only way to do this is to leverage the capabilities of an emerging technology known as a digital platform conductor (DPC).