How Could ITSM Contribute To The Purpose Of Any Business: Profitability

Mars 3, 2020 | Service Management

Are IT services just cost items? Can they contribute to the organization’s profitability and competitiveness by making it more agile, faster, lighter? IT is sometimes perceived as a controlling business function, difficult to change and therefore a blocker to the company’s efforts to evolve. What if we made the effort to say “yes” more often or “this is what we recommend…” rather than “no, it’s too risky/complicated/expensive”.
Written by David Lareau
Here are some ideas that can help improve IT profitability:
  • Think about development based on the next teams, next steps, on important indicators to see potential problems and ensure acceptable final delivery for operations – and avoid uncontrollable series of incidents and customer dissatisfaction. Shift Left applied to development aims to integrate security, test, support and operations teams from the earliest stages of development.
  • In the same vein, the calculation of performance metrics can be integrated into development. For example, if a manual task is now automated by using an orchestration tool. The savings generated can increase each time the function is used. The more you use the automatic function, the more you amortize development costs and the more you save. This data must be shared with Business.
  • The same development integration logic can be used for an application’s availability rate to make it easier to calculate.
  • When the IT team does not offer chargeable services externally, an internal chargeback system can make it possible to align the costs of delivered services with the value generated for the business unit and act as a comparison with outsourced services. In the case where the team offers billable services externally, it is important to have a simple and unified (ideally) system in order to recover all the hours worked by each of the parties involved and billable to the client. (i.e. different systems manage the time spent on projects, another one for operations related to customer support, one for internal support, another one for fixed monthly invoicing, finally another one for payroll. Not surprising that end of every month is hectic.)
  • Design a high-level IT service catalogue (know what we’re talking about, what we offer as services) Doing this makes it clear to all parties wanting to know what can be expected from the IT department. I could share a sample service catalog with you if you are interested, please leave me a note.
  • A process maturity audit and a cost-benefit analysis can help align everyone to ultimately gain control and profitability.
  • An IT department should contribute to business profitability and ITSM managers must be contributors to this engagement.

Share this post