Selecting the right tool for your organisation is no easy matter. With roughly 200 vendors selling help desk and service desk tools, ranging from basic ticketing systems to full ITSM suites, and a multitude of deployment models and licensing options…the choice is staggering. Whether you are looking at basic or more comprehensive functionality, it is vital to understand the scope of your requirements. You should be able to explain your greatest challenges, your areas of pain, and the impact of not addressing them. This way, you will be better positioned to select a tool that meets your service, infrastructure and financial needs.
Decades of experience participating in tool selection processes shows that there are five common mistakes that IT groups make when selecting a new ITSM tool:
- Framework fascination – Requirements documents tend to focus extensively on ITIL® process adoption. They describe the IT infrastructure, the support organisation structure, and page after page of process requirements. Yet they often fail to explain the challenges the IT organisation is facing, or the outcomes needed to deliver value to their customers. Almost every ITSM vendor supports the framework, and their tools offer more ITIL® capabilities than most IT groups will deploy in a lifetime. Placing too much focus on the adoption of IT practices often draws attention away from the customer experience and the issues that impact the business. These should always be your main concerns.
- Not addressing the need for speed – In the post-pandemic world, the typical approach of gradually improving IT maturity through slow and steady adoption of increased levels of best practice does not cut it. Although the pursuit of agility and responsiveness was already at the top of most IT agendas, now it has become a matter of survival. Increasing IT responsiveness means understanding what your customers need and delivering quickly. If you establish that emphasis at the outset, you will focus on the capabilities of the tool that delivers these outcomes, and you will be less distracted by ‘shiny things’.
- Overstating initial objectives – Implementing a new tool is not the end of your journey, it is just the beginning. So, it’s important to avoid overstating your initial objectives and be realistic about what you can achieve within a reasonable timeframe. If the improvements you make are highly visible to your customers, you are more likely to get the support and funding you need for subsequent phases. Set a baseline by capturing metrics before and after implementation, to demonstrate your improvements.
- Getting stuck – Service desk teams often find themselves ‘stuck’ on an old software version. The vendor may have released several versions, but they sit out of reach, because the tool has been heavily customised and upgrading it is a major project. The service desk team is stuck with increasingly outdated technology, and to meet all the new demands that are placed upon them, they must turn to other tools and manual processes as workarounds.
- Use more modern methods to compile your shortlist – It is common for IT groups to build their shortlists based on analyst reports, but this is not always the best approach. Everyone pays attention to where a vendor’s dot appears in a magic quadrant, but few people pay attention to the advice that Gartner themselves offer on how it should be used. ‘Keep in mind that focusing on the leader’s quadrant isn’t always the best course of action. It all depends on how the provider aligns with your business goals.’
The advice above will hopefully help you avoid these pitfalls. If you can identify a vendor that will make a good partner, and will take a stake in your success, you are well on your way, but you need to act now.
There is a pressing need to modernise your service management. The leading analyst groups have all flagged service management and automation technologies as critical investments. It is the only way that we will be able to handle the volume and complexity of requests that will be coming at us thick and fast.
I will end with a couple of truths:
- On premise software is dead as a door nail, and your transformation strategy must accelerate their replacement.
- First-generation SaaS solutions are powerful tools, but they depend upon an entire eco-system of consultants, implementation partners and technical gurus, just to get them up-and-running, and then, a small army of developers and administrators to keep them in check. Six-week tool upgrade projects, just to fix bugs and get the latest features, are not acceptable. In the new normal, with significant costs cuts coming, and with IT having to deliver change, change, and change again, this approach is too slow and expensive.
- Second-generation SaaS solutions will have the edge. The No/Low-Code platform market is predicted to grow by 23% this year, as more and more businesses units want to automate their processes without the need for developers. The vendor does all the heavy lifting with backups, resilience, security and architectural enhancements, and updates simply happen in the background without any disruption to service.
If your organisation hasn’t risen to the challenge, now is the perfect time to discover why 2nd-generation SaaS is truly redefining what it means to deliver Software as a Service.