Bridging the ITSM divide – the case for an ‘as-a-Service’ model

For organisations of any size, across any sector, seamless IT isn't a 'nice to have'; it's an essential part of efficient, secure operations and – in turn – sustainable business growth. In other words, establishing the right approach to service management is critical, so tickets are always assigned to the right resolver, and any issues can be resolved as quickly as possible. But as organisations scale up and their IT ecosystems naturally become more complex, with the requirements of multiple teams needing to be factored in, this often becomes easier said than done.

The natural solution is an IT Service Management (ITSM) platform, which intelligently automates multiple aspects of IT workflows – including incident, request, problem, and change management – and provides end users with a range of self-service options, including online portals and knowledge bases, typically based on the globally-recognised ITIL framework. However, for all the considerable advantages these platforms offer, their successful implementation frequently proves challenging for example:

• Designing a bespoke ITSM platform in-house is extremely complex and time-consuming, and so may not be practical for internal IT teams. As a result, as organisations scale up, they find themselves in an 'IT limbo', where a simple spreadsheet is no longer fit for purpose, but a full-scale ITSM deployment will not be achievable
  
  
• Most off-the-shelf ITSM platforms only offer limited scope for tooling, which can be a problem when highly specific compliance obligations must be adhered to
  
  
• If an organisation wishes to maintain its own, in-house resolvers (i.e. their internal IT team), relying on a third-party for ITSM services may prove problematic, as the provider may not wish to provide full access to their own system, as opposed to user access

Based on these challenges, it seems like what's needed is a solution to bridge the gap, allowing smaller IT operations to access the benefits of ITSM without the cost and complexity of a fully bespoke deployment. While this has been largely considered impossible for a number of years, our ongoing conversations with organisations already utilising our evolving portfolio of Managed IT solutions, we realised there had to be another way…

  … but this is all part of a longer journey, where we reconsider IT's wider role across organisations, shifting perception of it from an ongoing financial burden to a powerful driver of business growth and innovation. However you wish to develop your IT workflows in response to your organisations' evolving requirements, get in touch today and take the first step towards making this a reality.