infoTECH Feature

September 20, 2016

Don't Let Your Legacy ITSM System Stymie Your Digitalization Push

Today, companies are embarking on broad-reaching digital transformation strategies, using technology to change the way people work, communicate and interact with customers.  We call this approach digitilzation. Digitilization is helping organizations make more informed decisions, accelerate the development of new products and services, transform their supply chains and gain deep insights into their customer’s needs.  As enterprises continue to execute on their digital strategy, they are asking IT to provide more services.  All these services need to be delivered and managed effectively. 

Many companies may be stymied in their push if they neglect a key foundational element: dealing with their legacy ITSM systems.  These systems were not created to deliver digital service experiences.  So, how can IT organizations address the gap between increasing business demands and the limitations of legacy systems?  The answers lie in an examination of the limitations of typical legacy ITSM systems, and why consolidating multiple, disparate service desks onto a single platform is not the Herculean task they fear it will be.

The Curse of Legacy ITSM

Technologies such as cloud computing, automation and big data analytics tools enable us to shop, book travel, manage our finances, and run virtually every other aspect of our lives with a few mouse clicks or taps on a mobile device. But the ServiceNow 2016 State of Work Survey finds that experience disappears when we get to work. Most organizations do not apply their customer service principles to internal-facing experiences, creating a digital divide between our personal and work lives. We still rely on email and other decades-old technologies to perform even simple tasks, like initiating a purchase order.

We asked 2,400 managers in Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the U.S. and the U.K. to what extent are workplace services automated – and whether automation alone is enough to close the gap. We found that workplace services were 3x less likely to be considered fast than consumer services, and that manual, email-driven processes directly affect managers’ productivity:

  • 90 percent say they often use email to track the status of interdepartmental service requests status.
  • 69 percent say that manual interdepartmental services leave them less time for strategic initiatives, lower their productivity or cause them stress.
  • 79 percent say that monitoring email interferes with completing tasks, as they spend an average of 4 hours a day (3 at work and 1 at home) dealing with work emails. Twenty-five percent of email time occurs outside of work.

For IT departments, this is what I call, “the curse of the legacy ITSM system.” Users must submit tickets or ask questions via emails, and grow frustrated even as IT personnel drop what they’re doing to address their questions and solve problems. Yet many IT teams choose to stick with the status quo. They stick with their legacy ITSM systems, making it impossible for IT to address these challenges. That places the entire business at risk, and the quest to differentiate devolves into a struggle to survive.

Multiple technologies add complexity

Many legacy ITSM systems are based on a number of disparate technologies cobbled together during mergers and acquisitions. Integrating and customizing them to meet constantly changing business requirements is difficult. That makes central visibility and reporting a nightmare. The technological reality is that they are actually holding the business back, making it that much harder to turn IT into a business driver.

Closed frameworks block agility

Legacy ITSM systems typically involve closed frameworks that are set up in an authoritative manner. These systems are likely delivering against a predetermined set of best practices that tightly adhere to methodologies like ITIL or ISO 20000. While these processes are beneficial, many businesses today want to couple IT tooling with business innovation, and a cookie-cutter set of best practices can only take them so far. They want the ability to build a unique set of processes – tailored ITSM service delivery capabilities – aligned with the way they do business. Legacy ITSM systems simply don’t have the agility required to adapt and support requests coming from the business side of the organization.

On-premises delivery mechanism contributes to high IT costs

Most legacy ITSM systems are based on an on-premises model. The application stack is implemented in the data center and is supported by on-premises servers, operating systems, databases, and other infrastructure components. With this model, legacy ITSM systems that are supposed to act as a business accelerator ironically contribute to the high cost of merely keeping the lights on. Simply keeping up with the patching requirements eats up any capacity to pursue the business value IT is more than capable of providing.  As such, the on-premises delivery model further drains IT budgets and prevents teams from pursuing innovation and progress.

Not all clouds are created equal

But it’s not as simple as taking the functionality of an on-premises solution and moving it to a cloud. When looking for the right cloud solution, it’s important to consider how your data is handled, multi-tenancy issues, performance expectations, security consideration, regulatory compliance and more. The reality is all vendors need to be evaluated if they can truly deliver the expectations of a modern, enterprise-grade cloud environment.

One platform can rule it all

These limitations are compelling more organizations to consider migrating from their legacy ITSM systems to a single cloud-based platform. Analyst firm Research and Markets predicts the global cloud-based ITSM market will grow from $4.41 billion this year to $8.78 billion by 2021. The firm reported in June 2016 that organizations view cloud-based solutions as an immediate opportunity to quickly and flexibly deliver business-enabling IT services at lower cost. It credits a combination of consumerization of IT trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, an increasingly mobile workforce, and the Internet of Things (IoT) with the benefits of agile implementation, easy deployment and subscription-based pricing.

The fact is, a modern ITSM platform can improve both IT and business efficiencies. Benefits include increased OpEx resulting from higher levels of automation and process consolidation across all of IT. This enables IT to become a provider of critical business services that support users across the entire organization, instead of devoting time to maintaining and troubleshooting on-premise systems.

Taking this step is not a luxury, it’s a business necessity. IT departments will soon discover their legacy ITSM systems cannot help them meet the demands to support their organization’s digitaltization push. Consolidating ITSM into one platform that automates business processes and workflows will help their organizations not only stay relevant, but achieve a significant competitive advantage by enabling users to focus on strategic priorities instead of managing spreadsheets or replying to floods of emails. Legacy systems make it impossible to accommodate tomorrow’s demands, so the time to act is now. 




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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