IT Service Management of the Future

Service Desk & End User Computing

As one of my previous leaders I worked with would say we are living in a WUCA world and we need to be prepared for that. Four key forces are Changing the world and in response the industry is changing dramatically. The last 24 months have seen an explosion of new thinking, new providers, and new technologies with focus on customer’s speed & productivity, the impact of the pandemic has only accelerated the pace of these changes. Competition is fierce, and enterprises are hungry for transformational changes that leverage these forces in helping create referenceable customers. 

• Design Thinking – Leading providers are bringing in expertise from digital agencies & consumer industries to design and build experiences and outcomes for customer’s customers. Prototypes are often been created in 3 months or less.
• Cloud – Public cloud infrastructure is reducing time to value, while public cloud software is changing expectations of what enterprise software can be. Leading providers are partnering & brokering, rather than creating walls.
• Data & Analytics – Leading firms are using data from thousands of clients to recommend fixes and to help predict next best action. Still nascent in IT Service Management context, which tends to rely on traditional BI practices, however will become commonplace soon.
• Automation – Using software to provision infrastructure, remediate incidents and replicate human actions for business processes is leading to a 20% to 40% reduction in cost for in-scope services

This brings us to what is now referred to as “The Digital Workplace” helping bring People, Processes, and Technology together to deliver anywhere, anytime on any device end user services with goal of providing great business outcomes utilizing secure business applications and data.

From a People perspective, technical skills require staff to be “hyper converged engineer” to manage the current and future converged technology. Domain/Practice staff will be required to know the domain business processes, terminology, and applications their clients are utilizing and finally compliance needs to be aware of domain regulations, security compliance.

Clients today want the same experience they have on “Sunday” with their iPhone or Android device and business applications on “Monday” i.e. the work week, which includes choice of devices, workstyles, and mobile. Delivery Models are highlighted by onshore/nearshore, automation, and ‘Bring Your Own Service’ (BYOS) models which is moving from persona-based models, verticalization and characterized by EUC Services understand their business domains, Less workstations and more collaborative meeting areas & process optimization by leveraging data analytics.

IT Service Management of the Future will be characterized by Mobility, Connectivity & Collaboration as Enterprises now understand that Workforce productivity and engagement is a source of competitive advantage and the workplace technology experience drives this, more so in the post pandemic Era. 

Workforce mobility has grown exponentially, the workplace encompasses three environments; the office (increasingly less significant in some industries than others like manufacturing), the home and the road, more staff are working across more locations every-day. Seamless connectivity across devices is critical.

Integration of work and life technology is enabled through programs such as BYOD, yet, users appear overwhelmed by choice of device, workplace tools and systems. True collaboration brings people together from anywhere, able to work together anytime, In the smart economy, where BOTS execute repeatable tasks, collaboration and productivity across the smart workforce has become a critical point of differentiation.

Technology Support in the “ITSM of the Future” will need to digitise as enterprises are focused on the mantra of eliminate, shift left, automate. Smart service centres will catch the remaining support calls i.e. those that are not automatically triaged or resolved via Self Service or Automation. 

Let us now look at the two primary elements of the “ITSM of the Future” viz. Service Desk & End User Services.

SERVICE DESK

From a Service Desk perspective, the most contemporary Service Desk solutions contain the following elements: Elective Channel Access, Bring Your Own Device, Enterprise Service Portal, Corporate Application Store, Enhance Remote Support, Tech Bars, Service Request automation, Data Analytics Engine, Cognitive Agent, Knowledge Article Management that is trusted etc.

Just seven years ago, almost all support contacts were initiated through voice, regardless of call type, support centres were staffed with large numbers of low skilled frontline personnel. However, channels have expanded since then, decreasing the reliance on voice. Managing the complex multichannel support experience is challenging, support staff are struggling with more complex calls due to rigorous shift left programs. Sophisticated enterprises have all but eliminated voice, while improving the customer experience, Chatbots dominate as a gateway experience to self-service tools and information portals, Virtual assistants are poised to become ‘plug and play’, as shift left continues, support staff will be highly skilled and will required an ITSM platform that can keep pace with their requirements. 

As the below figure demonstrates, Incident and Service Request Management are the most visible activities from End-Users perspective. Hence, Service Desk must be integrated in the support value chain because optimum costs come from the right use and integration of the different stakeholders and tools.

Social Media is playing a big role, by helping users support themselves on social media platforms, where they can ask a question of a colleague and obtain a fast and relevant answer, examples include, Yammer, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Service Catalogue as a Service (SCaaS) provides a retail, online shopping experience for business services, including IT. Most staff today prefer to access trusted knowledge assets such as FAQs hence IT information sources must be reliable, validated and current. 

Hyper Automation is leading the way with Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing autonomics such as IBM’s Watson and Wipro’s Holmes perform tasks that are simple and structurally repetitive at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. Kiosks and equipment vending machines that are strategically placed in facilities enable users to visit on their own time, when they require service, and resolve a specific issue or manage new or replacement equipment.

However, the Enterprises consistently face three key challenges in the transformation of their Workplace and would need to be mindful in addressing these.

• Seamless Digital experience across multiple channels; connected, contextual and consistent.
• Shift left impacts the traditional ‘first call resolution’ metric. User metrics supplement contractual SLAs and KPIs.
• As “simple calls” shift left, must invest in training for smart service centre staff.

In summary, the Service Desk of the future would be recognized by: Omni-Channel Engagement (Telephone, portal, chat, email, social media, mobile app 7×24), Material support, Simplify, Shift Left & Eliminate, Automate, Shift Left Technologies, Knowledge Enablement, Self-healing and Self-Help, Skilled Resources, Agents skilled on common applications and devise for the particular vertical, Resolution Rate 90%+,Improving agent and Self Service Knowledge/FAQs, Capable and trusted Service Catalogue, Superior Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction Improvement and a Commercial Model of Pay by Contact or Resolved Ticket (i.e., incident or service request).

Pricing Approach for Service Desk – The Client’s business drivers should determine the optimal pricing approach. It may vary from a Per Seat, Low price model with a standalone Service Provider focussed on cost containment with a low touch service, with a complex environment to a Per Contact, high price model with a multisource service provider providing High Touch Service. Additionally, ‘Bring Your Own Service’ methods where today’s users are encouraged to self-help, with tools provided to facilitate this will also have an impact and need to be factored in. 

END USER COMPUTING

Based on the technology drivers and trends there is a growing focus on employee productivity and engagement which has led to a renewed focus on the Work Space, changing the work place environment, improve the way we work, enhance effectiveness, encourages mobility, Offices personify advanced approach to workplace technology, optimize assets, Reduce cost with underutilized space and re-invest in higher quality homeworking spaces in response to the post pandemic era.

Progressive enterprises are progressing with automation in a pragmatic fashion, even before the pathway to automation was clear, sophisticated enterprises were preparing by standardizing services, documenting processes and streamlining activities. These were tedious but necessary and today confident enterprises are well and truly on their Automation journey. They are experimenting, and learning fast and being rewarded with significant efficiency gains fuelled by automation, these productivity improvements will continue to accelerate as automation moves “up” into higher order IT processes as well as “out” into business operations, urging the providers to mature their data mining and machine learning platforms.

• Simplifying Mobility
  • Demand for business mobility is increasing and EUC providers are keen to have solutions that simplify management when users move from one device to another.
  • Service providers are partnering with enterprise mobility management vendors to build and deploy applications and ensure that users have a seamless experience across all devices.
• Cloud Influence
  • Many enterprises are keen to move their infrastructure to cloud because they want agility, scalability and lower operating costs. Cloud platforms will allow customers to build applications faster, enhance IT security, and rapidly recover from disasters.
• Heterogeneous Environment
  • Mobility programs have brought not only more device types into the enterprise but also more operating systems and applications. Enterprises will look to secure applications & data and will expect EUC solutions to have the ability to support and manage content across platforms.
• Emerging Enterprise Apps
  • Enterprises that routinely govern end-user computing experience are expanding into the enterprise space to provide businesses with mobility solutions. As an example, Apple partnered with IBM to develop apps., addressing industry-specific mobility challenges. Another example is of Google’s Android for Work offers business apps. with security, management and support built in.

Most contemporary End/User Field Services solutions contain smart hands & feet, Asset Management, dedicated technicians at key locations, VIP Support with proactive health checks, hot swap, spoke and wheel depot equipment models. Current State of End User Services is characterized by the following elements

• Self-Support
  • Self-help portals, chat capability with agents, self-healing of components, better knowledge management databases and FAQs, Users are doing more – swapping drives in laptops, plug in replacement machine, etc., Remote desktop support is minimizing “hands and feet” staffing needs through use of tools that provide seamless control of s/w updates, security and asset management.
• Supplier Response
  • The distinction between level 1 help desk and level 2 is less clear now – higher first call resolution rates, standard offerings into automation investments greatly increases end user productivity, quality and speed of services, Lower resource unit to FTE counts; Greater dispatch radius.

• Other Impacts
  • VIP support is becoming “very important”, Newer applications are less disruptive to the desktop – either browser-based or Citrix (or equivalent) based. Focus on Operating System(s) in future, not hardware.

EUS is still not a commoditized service if delivered correctly with subscription service based on service catalogue & optimized by user type, having a service kiosk where client comes to service provider, with predictive analytics, Self-healing applications and moving beyond correlation, to automation, where defects are detected with control charts (e.g., in manufacturing) can lead to great user experience and satisfaction. 

Social Media is both internal and external to the enterprise is bringing a totally new dimension to play where, communities of interest are formed and focuses on knowledge management, Use of online media to ask and contribute to questions is increasingly prevalent, providers validates inputs, creates knowledge assets with zero contacts all the while keeping the end users informed via tweeting of incident status, the possibilities are truly endless. 

Ultimately, this consumerization of IT puts the user into the centre even more, with focus on higher business user satisfaction, service agility and mobility through seamless global collaboration, transparency on cost and easier approval methods, leading to higher end user satisfaction with self-services, freedom of choice (basket of goods, BYOD), and Social collaboration.

The future is even more exciting with a post pandemic workforce and enterprises looking at newer ways of working (e.g. social collaboration, augmented reality), increased support of mobile workplace scenarios, easy and fast integration (M&A, external workforce, customers and partners), both multi device working scenarios and Multi-purpose use of devices (private / business) & Flexible work scenarios (part time, location independent working, home office, parental leave, etc.). Workplace requirements are changing rapidly and are driven primarily by the users raised proficiency of IT, customers know very well what is valuable to them and with more than a decade of leadership tussom, powered by eStomi, has deep knowledge of technologies & tools in this converged arena of ITSM, ITOM and ITAM to deliver an unmatched experience.