Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

SaaS has the potential to become a viable solution for organizations struggling with ITSM tool implementation and facing challenges such as:

• High cost and cycle time of implementation
• Frequent upgrades and version changes which are inevitable in nature.
• Highly skilled and trained staff requirements to use and manage the tool
• Installing and managing hardware/infrastructure for ITSM tool

A SaaS based ITSM tool can address these challenges by the very model of SaaS when it allows the software to be deployed and managed by a third party service provider. But is that all? Does SaaS solve all the problems of an ITSM implementation? The problem doesn’t seem to be as simple as stated here.

Most of the IT organizations who have adopted ITIL, have some or the other tool to carry out functions and process activities such as:

• Service deck
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management

The critical question to answer here, is to find the suitability of a SaaS based tool for an organization. With existing tools in place an assessment should be done on the fitment of SaaS based solution which will cause minimal impact and organizational change. SaaS based ITSM may not be suitable for all IT organizations and needs to be evaluated for a suitability test, which includes but not limited to: technology compatibility, process integration, ease of implementation, enterprise architecture and IT strategy. In order to fully exploit the benefits of SaaS while understanding the challenges, its necessary to analyze the SaaS model from its architectural complexity, operational intricacies and prevailing business needs point of view. After a detailed analysis and comprehensive assessment of the existing ITSM environment, organizations can leverage the agility, flexibility and economics that a SaaS based ITSM can offer.

Once the assessment is done and results show positive indicators towards SaaS based ITSM, the approach should be to look at legacy applications and tools to best integrate to give a true On-Demand ITSM implementation. The benefits that can be expected from a typical On-Demand ITSM are:

• Reduced total cost of ownership(TCO) including cost of tool, hardware & maintenance due to shared hosting and flexible pricing model.
• Best in class features and updates automatically happening due to wider community of hosted users.
• Larger collection of best practices since the community of users drives the tool functionality and features.
• Improved Scalability, serviceability and security with increased business needs.

The two questions that I had posed at the beginning of the blog are probably addressed to some extent now and it also points to a huge opportunity for consulting companies to develop good practices, offerings around the assessment and enablement of On-Demand ITSM.