As doing more with less becomes a top priority for IT departments, it is more important than ever before to ensure that specialised skills are not deployed simply to keep the lights on. This emerged during a webinar hosted by Freshworks in partnership with ITWeb last week.
Hemalakshmi Balaraman, product expert at Freshworks, said improving agent productivity had become a greater concern as employees work from home and experience more challenges, with a resulting increase in the number of tickets.
“We have seen agents spending a lot of time solving L1 tickets, which are usually repetitive and mundane. Challenges service desks are facing now are that too much time is spent on manual tasks, there is redundancy in solving repetitive issues, time is lost in the approval queue, and there is a lack of transparency in assessing agent performance,” she said.
However, ITSM solutions were not one-size-fits-all solutions, she said. “The service management solutions must have the right capabilities and functionalities for your organisations and today, with remote workforces, we need to do a lot more with a lot less. This is why a right sized solution has become much more important.”
Kevin Wilson, GM Group IT at Stefanutti Stocks Construction, said: “Agents’ time is the most valuable thing we have, and you’re sinking into digital debt if your agents are spending more than 50% of their time just on keeping the lights on. You have very expensive, well trained agents, so the more of their time you hand over to automation and machine learning, the more time they will have available to be knowledge workers. You can’t solve higher problems like digital transformation until you’ve solved the service issues.”
You can’t solve higher problems like digital transformation until you’ve solved the service issues.
Kevin Wilson, Stefanutti Stocks Construction
Wilson noted that an ITSM solution needed to deliver more than an ITSM volume analysis – it had to indicate how much time was being spent on manual, repetitive tasks, and automate those.
“Once you have the time back, you can innovate,” he said. “We are heading to a place where a lot of the systems and a lot of the tickets that will be logged will be automated. Computers will be talking to computers and because of all the information we have on the environment and users, we will already know they are experiencing a problem, and addressing it,” he said.
Ashwin Narayanan, product consultant at Freshworks, said enterprises increasingly sought ITSM solutions that would allow them to scale up their employee base without having to grow the IT service desk accordingly. They also wanted seamless, integrated management capabilities, an open, extensible platform and machine learning and AI to enable continuous improvement.
Growing into ESM
As IT becomes the driver of processes across departments, ITSM can grow into Enterprise Service Management (ESM) to enable smoother, more efficient processes across the enterprise, the panel said.
“We ended up here almost by default because now IT looks after everything with an ethernet cable; so the IT service desk is supporting departments across the enterprise, even doing tickets to look after gates, taps and valves,” said Wilson.
He said that where the ITSM solution is abstractable and extensible, and IT starts mapping certain support processes for other departments, demand grows for more automated service management solutions. For example, HR might want to enable an employee to log a ticket from his cellphone. With the right ‘plumbing’ and flexibility, ESM [Enterprise Service Management] can evolve out of ITSM. “The sky is the limit for automating processes across the organisation,” said Wilson.
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