3 steps for modernizing your government ITSM through the cloud
Transitioning IT from a support role to one that impacts the overall value chain of an organization can be difficult for even the most seasoned IT executives. These changes typically involve large, expensive migration projects or the ongoing, resource-intensive manual management of hybrid worlds. However, increased scrutiny, growing service expectations, demand for more cloud applications, and a need to integrate new data sources have service managers looking for a more agile and cost-effective approach.
If your government agency is invested in finding ways to deliver an excellent experience for internal and external constituents, moving away from legacy systems to the cloud is the answer.
By shifting operational demands to the cloud, Modern IT Service Management for Government—an evolved approach to IT service management (ITSM)—streamlines manual processes, cuts service delivery times, improves reporting, and helps redefine department accountabilities.
Most importantly, though, modern IT service management immediately and directly impacts each core component of a service manager’s role, helping meet those growing demands for improved and faster service. Here’s how the cloud is changing service management:
Design for Efficiency and Agility
The days of solely operating in a support role are over. Not only will your agency be more responsive and efficient in the cloud, but you’ll have a direct, tangible impact on the agency’s bottom line.
Moving away from customized, hard-to-maintain legacy applications to an agile, cloud-based solution turns your IT organization into a reliable and cost-efficient service center that’s focused on faster resolution time and minimal end-user effort.
A cloud-based ITSM solution lets you triage incoming tickets before incidents, changes, requests, or problems are ever created; automations help provide personalized, high-touch interactions to serve needs in a variety of ways; and, because it’s more flexible and scalable than on-premise systems, the cloud affords opportunities to combine, consolidate, and align assets to improve the satisfaction of both internal employees and external customers.
Deliver a Superior Experience, Now and Later
Legacy systems keep IT reactive. Because they’re less flexible and slower than cloud-based platforms, reporting lags, collaboration between Dev and Ops teams is minimal, visibility into issues is limited, and data is siloed.
The cloud minimizes or completely removes these barriers, making it easier to foresee problems and challenges. Disparate systems are integrated into a single dashboard with robust reporting capabilities. Increased visibility means IT no longer plays from behind, giving the capability to solve challenges before they become bigger issues. IT finally gets to be proactive and can anticipate rather than react.
Cloud-based platforms also offer out-of-the-box forms, workflows, and automations to create reliable, predictable, and efficient IT fulfillment processes, that can be easily modified without coding to meet your specific needs. This helps agencies streamline current processes and develop the kind of first-rate services users have come to expect.
As end-user expectations and scrutiny increase, the ability to configure rather than develop new features and better processes as organizations evolve will be critical factors in incident, change, and problem management. Why not build an ITSM foundation based on proven best practices now, rather than kicking the can down the road one more time?
Operate at a Higher Level
IT silos limit visibility into data and requests. Compared to cloud-based solutions, the limited agility of on-premise systems leads to ticket backups, overwhelmed employees, and overall poor user experience.
Modern IT Service Management for Government improves operations on every level by enabling DevOps workflows, streamlining data, and integrating applications. These integrations, in turn, allow change owners to create and track development tasks quickly and visibly with integration to solutions like Virtual Team Foundation Services, while software updates and deployments stay organized by being associated with specific releases tied to the services provided.
Self-service portals resolve common and minor issues quickly and effectively, while SLA management provides countdown clocks, color-coded icons, and notifications of SLA breaches before they happen. Mobile-friendly web-based service consoles and role-based security allow for easily tailored experiences from any device, browser, or location.
Why Modern IT Service Management for Government?
IT professionals in the public sector—many with limited budgets and resources—can now deliver a superior IT experience through the cloud.
If you’re operating an ITSM application that’s not fully cloud-based and is not an intelligent platform, you’re missing a huge opportunity to improve end-user experiences, impact your agency’s bottom line, and future-proof your service management processes.
With built-in flexibility to meet the unique needs of each department in your agency and PinkVerify™ certification for 11 ITIL® processes, Modern IT Service Management for Government easily extends into non-IT departments with out-of-the-box capabilities.
Modern IT Service Management for Government supports your agency’s digital transformation initiatives by offering native integration with Office 365, Power BI, and Azure—helping you capitalize on existing investments and the familiarity of Microsoft productivity and management tools. And because it’s portable, you can easily move between your on-premise platform and your existing Dynamics 365 platform.
To find out how Modern IT Service Management powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 can streamline your government agency watch this webcast, Modern Service Management for Government.
