How ITSM Software Is Revolutionising the Workplace for Employees

We’ve seen how businesses who haven’t adapted to the times and haven't focused on digital transformation - especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its challenges - have been left behind.

itsm software

Digital environments that are unfit for purpose create increased risk of longer outages, large volumes of unprocessed data, manual tasks that are increasingly time-consuming and an ever-rising number of tickets and queries for your IT service management (ITSM) specialists.

Businesses are now turning to updated ITSM software to solve these challenges. So how is ITSM software revolutionising the workplace for employees?

Improving the Digital Workplace

Our digital workplace and the emphasis on connectivity has shifted our work cultures to focus more and more on the experience and capabilities of the employee. And with the right technology comes the right engagement. We realise this might seem a little esoteric, but this is a real tangible benefit. A Gallup report discovered “the behaviors of highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability.”

Similarly, the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found 71% of business professionals ranked employee engagement as ‘very important’ when trying to achieve overall success. 

Within ITSM, work is directly influenced by how quickly you can solve issues. It was recently discovered that service desks take, on average, 24.2 hours to provide a first response to a query. That’s just one example of how our productivity is impacted by the efficiency of our software. 

A key challenge for ITSM software is how it goes about unlocking time for users, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks. For example, in 2020, the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust implemented a ‘flu-reporting bot’ to ease the impact of a winter flu outbreak (on top of the early COVID cases the Trust were dealing with). 

The flu-reporting bot works by capturing updates for more than 10,000 staff vaccinations across multiple clinical sites, made possible by intelligent automation. "Right from the start, intelligent automation has helped us enhance staff engagement, free up valuable resources and has had a positive impact on the work we do for our staff and patients," said Neil Picton, Head of Workforce Engagement and Information.

"The flu-reporting bot has helped to streamline a heavy administrative load for our Occupational Health team. It has also improved data accuracy and ensured valuable time isn't diverted from supporting staff and patient care."

This switch from manual reporting to automated reporting has already saved 2,000 hours of time previously spent compiling those reports. It’s also saved nearly three months of cumulative administrative time. 

When we talk about automation and improved ITSM software revolutionising the workplace, we aren't talking about one grand idea that changes the world. Small implementations like the flu-reporting bot are simple choices yet make a big impact. This is what we believe in; the sum of marginal gains, improving all our processes by certain amounts, adding up to big improvements.

Ensuring Talent Retention

The move towards automation within ITSM is also positively affecting the way businesses hire and retain talent. Right now, we’re living in an age of the most diverse talent market. People are digitally-savvy, knowledgeable and know what they want from a place of work.

Employees now want a seamless working experience within an integrated environment. Service management is no longer effective when it’s sprawling, disparate and provided by legacy systems. When we introduce new ITSM software, we’re implementing a number of things that are both attractive to new hires and reasons for current employees to stick around:

  • Responsive systems: Employees don’t want to compromise on their productivity. A good quality IT environment allows them to stay at peak performance.
  • Collaborative and personalised: Take enterprise social networking and artificial intelligence, for example. When we can introduce AI into those systems, in the form of chatbots or assistants, staff benefit from quicker solutions and suggestions to their issues.
  • User-centrism: Long has there been a focus on customer experience - now, it’s on employee experience. When ITSM software and other applications are built to be user-centric, employees experience a new level of usability. 
  • Self-service: The right tools allow employees to ‘go it alone’, finding the solutions to problems quicker than usual and taking ownership of those problem-solving moments. 

The right technology creates a seamless working experience, one that new hires and current staff will appreciate and want to keep coming back to.

Cost Reductions Through ITSM Software

Continued growth means a continued operational cost, which could either grow linearly or exponentially. Because of that, right now the real issue is how to cut costs but still retain quality. ITSM software is the solution more and more businesses are turning to.

Through better ITSM, you benefit from:

  • Automated workflows.
  • Improved asset management.
  • Efficient self-service.

These three things offer cost reduction to service levels, without interrupting that service quality you know you’re capable of. A Forbes Insights survey on the state of ITSM discovered certain percentages of respondents enjoyed a range of benefits:

  • 42% realised cost reductions in their processes.
  • 38% realised cost reductions in their IT systems.
  • 31% realised faster response times. 

It’s worth noting those who experienced the best benefits were the ones with enterprise-wide, integrated ITSM systems - not ad hoc infrastructure. In a BMC article, Joe Hertvik expands on this:

“Treat your ITSM system as a major corporate project and asset, rather than something that’s put together piecemeal, as a DIY project or as a special project to address one concern. Assign significant time, money and resources to developing a solid ITSM system. Don’t make it a one-and-done project.”

Unlocking Time

When we can automate within ITSM, we can unlock time that was previously spent on mundane and mostly repetitive tasks. ITSM itself used to be burdened with these tasks that stole time and energy from service desk operators. 

Now, through adopting ITIL-based processes, we’ve seen improvements in both incident and change management. Similarly, knowledge management too has been improved (we mentioned previously about how users are capable of sharing resolutions for common issues). 

Now, with the advent of mobile service desk applications that are both location and context-aware, users can experience services tailored to their needs, alongside crowd-sourced collaboration. All of these combine to revolutionise the workplace and create a better employee experience. Remember, it’s all about the sum of marginal gains - improving multiple smaller processes instead of that one big (and usually unachievable or costly) change. 

What these improvements guarantee is not only speed but also a reclamation of time that was once dedicated to repetitive tasks. From a service desk perspective, this is a huge improvement. Service desk teams can now:

  • Automate ticket updating and escalation.
  • Better ensure correct workflows are followed for tickets through the use of automated prompts. 

We realise the service desk can sometimes be inefficient and time-consuming. However, automation within ITSM is the way around this issue. Genuine problems need genuine solutions. To help dig further into the amazing benefits of automation within ITSM and its impact on employee experience, download our guide.

Employee Experience: How Automation and ITSM Solutions Drive Successful Change

In this guide, we cover many interesting and important facts when it comes to automation and ITSM. Creating a collaborative, efficient and productive environment is the be-all and end-all of a workplace. Automation is a way of achieving that for your employees.

From providing the right tools to increasing engagement and collaboration, our guide delves into the key considerations for you to think over. So what are you waiting for? Simply click this link for your free copy.