What are the essential features of an ITSM platform?

[Johnson Perry]

IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are gaining prominence in the New Normal more than ever. The reasons are - reduced IT costs and the standardized IT service delivery within the organization. 

Having said that, here’s a lowdown of the salient features of a cloud-based ITSM platform:

• Service desk support
• Software licensing and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management
• Device lifecycle management
• Identity management
• Asset provisioning and management

Besides managing IT services, what does an ITSM tool do?

ITSM platform benefits a company in the following ways:

1. Introduces a better understanding of business needs
2. Increases cost-efficiency
3. Increases IT-productivity through defined roles & responsibilities 
4. Helps in handling counter-regulatory and compliance challenges 

In the organizational domain, when people speak about ITSM, what instantly comes to their mind is ServiceNow - an IT automation platform that assists establishments in improving operations by streamlining (and automating) tasks. Here’s how:

1. Improves the quality of IT solutions
2. Exceeds end-user expectations
3. Gives breathing-space to the IT team
4. Reduces long-term ITSM process costs

Don’t believe us?

The ServiceNow website tells us that the company was listed by FORTUNE as one of the World’s Most Admired Companies.

What’s more, in 2017, Forrester concluded that ServiceNow as an ITSM contributed to:

• Enabling employees to handle a wider variety of incidents, by increasing the capacity of the team by 20%
• Reduction of $4 million in infrastructure costs over three years
• The time an average employee spends to make a service request, dropped by 15-minutes 
• $3 million in efficiency savings over three years
• The monthly volume of service and incident requests dropped by 66%
• The monthly volume of high-priority incidents fell by 25%

Service Request Management is a prominent feature of ServiceNow ITSM, which is yet another reason why it has many takers. It provides employee self-service via a published catalogue of services, service level agreements, and automated workflows. Additionally, the mobile capabilities offer employees the freedom to request services irrespective of the device and time. This, in turn, allows them to get automated status updates, which ensure that their expectations are met. 

Some more benefits of ServiceNow’s Service Request Management are:

• Delivering a consumer-style experience via a familiar, and easy-to-use shopping cart checkout interface
• Enhancing the service quality by eliminating the manual tasks and fulfilment delays with approvals, and automated workflows
• Boosting end-user satisfaction by keeping them up-to-date with the notifications about their requests and status updates

Haven’t tried an ITSM platform yet? It’s never too late to get started!