IT Service Management as a Business Strategy

This write-up acts as a guide to anyone who wants to understand the basics of using IT service management as a business strategy. Starting with a live example, it follows a journey of IT processes and systems relevant to provide services to meet an organization's business outcomes. Simple explanations with instances make it an easy read.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you click “Track your shipment” on a logistics company website or an e-commerce portal? How does it get this information? For a moment, can you imagine not knowing the status of your order? How do businesses achieve this? The answer is IT systems/IT service management!

In this day and age, IT is central to businesses in terms of strategic direction and revenue. Hence, they opt for robust IT systems to manage their operations. With companies expanding their footprint on a global scale and employees working out of multiple locations, facilitating communications between all offices is necessary. For example, DHL is the largest international Express, Mail, and Logistics company. With DHL’s presence in over 220 countries, it has a large workforce, and its operations involve shipping, tracking, communication, and connecting people. DHL achieved this by having a centralized business operation center connected to all its branches worldwide to provide uninterrupted IT services. But how is the connectivity achieved?

LAN, WAN, etc., are the ways to establish connectivity between business entities spread geographically. In recent times, we have seen numerous other technologies like MPLS,SDWAN, etc., used for the same purpose but using advanced technical know-how, one being cloud-based software. Delving a bit deeper, once the offices are connected using LAN/ WAN (Ex. For DHL), services like messaging, intercom, conference, etc., are provided and, this would be a private network for DHL employees. To facilitate this, the next step for DHL or businesses, in general, would be to invest in IT services delivery and service assurance tooling solutions to ensure automated and continuous provision of services. These are also known as L2C (Lead to Cash) and T2R (Trouble to Resolve) tools or the OSS (Operations Support Systems) and BSS (Business Support Systems)

As the name suggests, service delivery or L2C means delivering or provisioning services through order placement which, ends in billing. They are a set of integrated systems having request/order management, product catalog, billing tools. A user logs in to the request/order management tool and places a specific order for provisioning services like setting up WAN/ LAN, increasing bandwidth of an existing network, ordering new/replacing network elements, etc. The request then passes through a series of processes like approval, service commissioning, and finally leading to billing.

After provisioning the services, it's only logical to move onto maintenance and quality assurance, also known as T2R. Applications like event monitoring and reporting, incident management, etc., form the base for service assurance. For example, incidents are raised on the incident management application by a user if a service is not functioning as expected, there is interruption or degradation of services. Alternately, a performance monitoring tool can also proactively create an incident, even before a user notices it when it continuously monitors the network for any unusual service interruptions.

So, with these applications, IT service management has become simplified and customer-oriented with continuous innovation. So, it is safe to say that IT's importance has elevated significantly thereby, aligning IT with the business strategy is the need of the hour.It means organizations will need to dedicate budget, resources and, recruiting the right candidates. IT service management will be ingrained in an organization's growth. Hence investing in the best IT systems and solutions is the right step forward.