The ITSM market
Today, companies of all sizes are dependent on technology and must interact with IT departments in one way or another. Increasingly solicited, these departments are faced with recurring problems: lack of management and global visibility of infrastructures, poorly qualified incidents, multitude of tools without centralisation, management of multiple tool configurations, saturated user support, etc. The complexity of the role leads to malfunctions that make services less efficient, increase costs and reduce satisfaction.
One of the key roles of the ITSM approach is to help the departments in charge of infrastructures to simplify their tasks by abstracting the complexity of IT architectures and unifying the working relationships between IT teams and end users.
What is ITSM?
IT service management, literally ITSM, for "information technology service management", is a paradigm in which a company's information technologies are used to deliver value-added services to customers. To do this, the company needs to put in place an organisational structure that can deliver this value.As a component of the business in its own right, the IS department will need to be organised around specific processes. IT infrastructure management software has been specifically developed to address the problems encountered by companies using ITSM.
What are the main issues facing users of ITSM software?
Users are faced with a number of different issues. Firstly, the tools available on the ITSM market are either comprehensive, but excessively expensive and difficult to get to grips with, or free, but lacking in functionality and difficult to use.
Furthermore, the explosion of the digital transition has made corporate information systems increasingly hybrid, profoundly changing the activity of IT infrastructure managers. They have to deal with a multiplicity of problems that may emanate from compartmentalised and specific information systems. The IT infrastructure manager becomes a multitasker, having to switch constantly from one subject to another, without transition. This is detrimental to longer-term projects with high added value, which require method, reflection and concentration.
Finally, these problems are compounded by a market dynamic of cost domination in an international context. This automatically leads to having to do more without being able to benefit from additional human resources.
Faced with these changes in the IT landscape, we might ask ourselves how ITSM solutions can address these issues in order to deliver ever more value-added services?
By centralising, automating and taking account of business needs
To gain an overall view of the efficiency of the IT department, there are platforms that unify and centralise information, software, users and processes, making it possible to manage the configurations of all these elements, modifications, incidents and user requests.
Diagnostic interpretation of these tools should highlight areas for improvement. This data must be accessible to all the company's managers so that everyone can take responsibility.
On the other hand, some ITSM software offers the opportunity to automate certain tasks and processes.
In particular, they can help identify recurring incidents and then set up automated remedial actions. For example, by configuring the launch of backup software across an entire estate at the slightest detection of cryptolocker on a machine; or by eliminating recurring interventions, which are painful for both the IT department and customers, by automating the restart of service on a machine if the service goes down, or the deletion of temporary local files if the disk is full.
This frees up IT Departments' time, allowing them to concentrate on other projects or other customers.
This more intelligible global vision will enable each IS department to regain control of its processes and redirect resources towards high-ROI projects that require greater potential for innovation.
Through an agile and innovative cloud offering
Software solutions must adapt to the company's business processes, not the other way round. The scalability and maintenance of services are at the heart of the current issues facing IT Departments, and to respond effectively to these needs, the solutions must be agile and a regular source of new functionality.
Indeed, an agile organisation is more responsive, more adaptable and more innovative than traditional Taylorist organisations. Placed at the centre of tool development, IT teams are more autonomous and reap the benefits of a solution that is adapted to their context and meets their needs.
IT managers need to be able to focus on their core business, providing rapid and accurate support to their users, rather than spending their time administering and maintaining their ITSM software.
By equipping yourself with a solution whose agile and cloud approaches are at the heart of its development philosophy, the need for maintenance becomes virtually non-existent (little initial configuration, instant start-up, ease of use, online support, etc.).
Gartner estimates that over the next five years, half of all businesses will use the cloud to manage their IT services.
Other expected functions
- Real-time supervision ;
- Automated incident resolution workflows ;
- Alerting ;
- Management and deployment of software updates;
- Fleet inventory;
- Ticketing.
Future trends
Future trends in the ITSM market include a growing need for automation.
With a view to moving towards a proactive rather than reactive solution, ITSM solutions will have to incorporate machine learning into their solutions. This will enable the software to adapt itself to the specific characteristics and diversity of each customer's IT systems, to avoid false positives and to take action to ensure that the IT service provided to these users is ever more available and efficient.
Another market trend: End-User Analytics. This involves analysing user behaviour on machines and software, to ensure service availability for each user. For example, a machine could be automatically detected for its usage and therefore benefit from specific attention (software updates, port opening, access to web services, etc.). This finesse will also enable better identification of faults so that the source of problems can be reached more quickly by analysing a virtual network diagram. The aim? To guarantee the best possible IT experience and full customer satisfaction.
Finally, the MDM ( Mobile Device Management ) trend will continue to shape the market. This will enable the management of mobile devices, whether smartphones, tablets or hybrid computers.
Careful implementation
Choosing the right ITSM software solution requires the involvement of all stakeholders , from the IT department to support technicians, as well as users and senior management.
The choice of service provider or publisher will also be crucial. It's important to choose a partner who can demonstrate faultless support and whose solution is recognised for its ease of implementation.
Finally, the key to the success of a project of this type lies in the upstream management of change and communication around the project. This will involve, for example, organising regular meetings on :
- end-users getting to grips with the product ;
- the re-invoicing of the product by the IS;
- the organisational thinking of IT Departments to produce statistics relating to their service, etc.
Article translated from French