How to deliver outstanding IT services in a rapidly evolving world

Have you noticed that the challenges and expectations IT organizations are facing nowadays have become more complex and numerous? Do you think that these challenges and expectations are multiplying at a rapidly increasing pace? That’s what IT professionals are telling me. IT leaders and teams often feel overwhelmed, having to keep putting out fires instead of being proactively in control. This results in additional pressure and stress, while on-going responsibilities, such as meeting business and customer expectations, still have to be lived up to. Having worked in the service management world for over 16 years, I’d like to give you some food for thought on this topic.

The only constant in life is change. This relates to our everyday lives but the same is true in business. And what’s more, change keeps accelerating, to the point that businesses — and IT organizations — are finding it difficult to adapt.

Think of how IT helped businesses reshape their way of working — and even their entire business model — during the Covid crisis, or how businesses and IT are being challenged to use AI tools such as ChatGPT, often leading to further challenges, for example around security.

How to manage and meet expectations?

The world of technology, as described by Gartner and other industry analysts, can be overwhelming, to say the least. Buzzwords such as the aforementioned “AI,” but also “agile” or “hyper automation,” create a whirlwind of expectations that IT organizations are finding increasingly hard to meet. These expectations are coming from the businesses themselves, but also from customers, peers, and the market as a whole.

As always, it’s important to manage expectations and temper them when necessary. Keep up with what’s going on and carry out regular reality checks so you can avoid downright impossible promises and stay realistic. The key here is to develop a proactive approach, which allows the IT organization to deal with these changes a lot more easily, rather than staying in a reactive mode and simply responding as things happen.

Size matters, as does maturity

I’m the first to admit that it’s hard — and getting harder — to navigate the technology landscape and identify which new technologies to embrace. Which technologies can really help the organization move forward? And which ones are nothing but a distraction? That said, years of experience have taught me that that tech-decision demands that you first take into account the size and maturity of your organization. That’s the ideal starting point to make iterative improvements to your service delivery, rather than making drastic changes without a real ROI.

Take for example a smaller IT service desk with a fairly low volume of tickets to process and no proper knowledge management system in place. For that service desk, there’s no point in considering AI solutions (yet). Such solutions are only really cost-effective for organizations dealing with a high volume of tickets, and they also require a knowledge management database to function effectively.

Does this mean smaller IT service desks have no use at all for AI or automation? No, of course not. They can still invest in AI, but the ROI will inevitably take longer, as AI becomes smarter the more data it has to work with. And that’s definitely a factor to keep in mind when looking at AI solutions.

Are you looking for the right solution partner that fits your organization’s needs in today’s ever-changing, wide-ranging service management landscape? My mission is to help you achieve this. Feel free to reach out to me to continue the conversation.