Johannesburg, 09 Dec 2022
Integrating IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) with an AI-enabled platform helps reduce complexity, improve IT support, and makes employees and customers happier.
This is according to Radhika Narayanan, product marketer at Freshworks, who was addressing a recent webinar entitled Enabling an always-on business with ITSM + ITOM: Why ITSM & ITOM are better together.
Narayanan said: “ITSM is all about handling processes that support service, while ITOM is concerned with the upkeep of applications, services and connectivity. ITSM solutions with native ITOM features help organisations address challenges like reactive service management, which can result in slow resolution and costly downtime due to major incidents. Downtime can cost an organisation around $300 000.”
Freshservice, with ITSM and native ITOM, enables organisations to integrate and streamline incident response, with on-call response to ensure remediation takes place faster. Thanks to AI-enhanced alert management, organisations can reduce the noise by grouping and prioritising alerts, and use automation to simplify management.
She said ITSM and integrated ITOM also helped organisations overcome organisational silos, which could hamper decision making.
A poll of webinar participants found that some of the biggest challenges for IT in 2023 and beyond were getting the right tools and technologies in place (31%) delivering a seamless employee experience (25%), being ‘Always-On’ to minimise business impact (25%) and redefining the future of work with a hybrid workforce (18%).
These concerns aligned with challenges global IT organisations were facing, Narayanan said.
Narayanan noted: “When employees are happy and doing their jobs well, it impacts how they provide for customers. We enhance the experience for employees and external end users. When agents are productive, IT operations are running smoothly, and employees are happy, it reflects well on the organisation and ultimately customers are happy.”
However, webinar participants said challenges are holding them back from implementing a resilient modern ITSM system included a lack of a clear ITSM strategy (50%), insufficient funds and difficulty in getting buy-in from senior management (40%) and scepticism about implementation; downtime, and delivering on business value (10%).
Narayanan outlined the benefits Freshservice had delivered to customers. African Bank, a leading financial services institution, had moved to Freshservice after 20 years of using a legacy system. “They realised Freshworks offered extensive value for money, with significant ITSM enhancements that were ITIL-aligned. They also wanted an agile partnership with their vendor, which we offer. They were migrated in just 8 months, gaining key Freshservice capabilities. They achieved agile project management and incident management, knowledge base management capabilities, reduced service requests and improved problem management. The bank now has channel usage evenly split between web and mobile, and has found business users more eager to engage with IT support,” she said.
“The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study, commissioned by Freshworks, found that Freshservice delivers an ROI of 308%, within three months because of how quick it is to implement. We usually take under 40 days to implement Freshservice – our service management solution. We also have a very transparent pricing model, and a 21-day free trial,” she added.
Narayanan highlighted the importance of AI in enabling ITSM and ITOM. “AIOps is the next big thing for us. As part of our focus on AI, Freshworks recently introduced Freshservice Alert Management 2.0 to automatically create and route contextually richer incidents and reduce mean time to resolution. AIOps solutionsultimately reduces the need for end users to even contact the service desk as it helps detect and resolve issues before it impacts end users.”
“There is a perception that AI threatens jobs, but at Freshworks, and among our customers, AI has been proven to empower agents and allow them to focus on priorities. In fact, our Freshworks’ annual IT Service Management Benchmark Report showed 59% ticket deflection when AI-powered bots were used,” she said.
Share