Using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools to achieve excellence in IT Service Management
Adrian Cooper, a&o Business Development Director
 An organisation's IT infrastructure is critical to the efficient operation of almost every business function. As technology has matured and become more pervasive, IT has become the driver for improving business efficiency. IT service management (ITSM) is therefore becoming ever-more important in helping to deliver true business value by:
- Improving utilisation of key IT resources
- Enhancing service levels
- Reducing cost
- Improving qualitative measures, ie. Customer satisfaction, staff turnover and systems availability
To realise these benefits, it is highly likely that organisations will need to adapt existing (or implement new) processes, reorganise resources and adopt more formal mechanisms for monitoring and managing activities. Many of these tasks can be automated using the right software platform; but the lack of appropriate features forces many organisations to consider replacement of legacy tools.
All too often, however, a business case can be compromised by the need to invest in expensive software licences and infrastructure components that add complexity to the very environment that is being managed. It is a paradox that many traditional ITSM tools require significant investment in time, money and resource to implement and maintain. This places burden on the very function that the tools are supposed to be helping. As a result, a business case can quickly become compromised by added complexity and cost.
The emergence of the SaaS model, and the availability of fully featured ITSM tools such as service-now.com ‘on-demand’ provides a refreshing alternative. Designed to be quick to deploy, simple to use and customise whilst functionally rich and extensible; the benefits of a SaaS model are typically derived from reduced up-front capital investment as well as a reduction in the cost and effort of on-going maintenance and support. Incremental benefits can be derived by avoiding hardware and datacentre investments, improved service continuity and disaster recovery.
Indeed the principal of paying for IT services under a subscription or rental model is being more widely promoted as a next “big thing”. Under the umbrella term “Cloud Computing”, organisations will be able to access an increasingly diverse mix of applications and infrastructure-related services over the internet to benefit from the massive economies of scale possible by this macro-level consolidation. By implementing a “point” solution such as an ITSM tool in this way, it is an ideal opportunity to not only solve a specific business issue, but also to understand the broader value of this emerging arena of subscription-based services in a low-risk, controlled manner. |
