ITIL, ITSM, ITAM, and SaaS — Gang’s All Here!

ITIL, ITSM, ITAM, SaaS — four-lettered words? Maybe in the eyes of some technical support members, but these acronyms can sometimes make even the most hardened and experienced IT managers lightheaded. In today’s world, how does everything fit together? What about when you throw cloud computing into the mix? These are just a few of the questions many IT heroes are thinking on.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) represents a significant shift in the way services are implemented and delivered. Instead of focusing on hardware and infrastructure, IT leaders are determining the right processes and procedures necessary to provide their customers with top-level service, while also moving IT from being seen as a cost center to a value center and positively impacting an organization’s bottom line.

When you hear “processes and procedures” does your mind automatically go to ITIL? Tailoring and integrating an ITSM tool with ITIL processes have the opportunity to enable short and long-term success. Service management best practices can deliver business value, increase customer service, and decrease overall costs. Unfortunately, some processes and frameworks (ITIL) can cause confusion or hesitation, with fears that these processes are too rigid and cumbersome. A service management solution, like Samanage, comes out of the box ITIL-ready, meaning that if you want to adhere to ITIL, you’re capable of doing so. However, if you haven’t adopted ITIL or aren’t looking to live and breathe by the set of standards ITIL brings, you can still benefit from the solution’s built in structure in a way that doesn’t mean you have to change your business philosophy. Very simply put, one size doesn’t fit all anymore. The stringent boundaries of ITIL are now loose guidelines that a solution can automate for you. Giving you the power to truly determine what a best practice is for your organization.

Finding the balance between modern service management and ITIL in a SaaS environment isn’t as complicated as you might think. To help ease the stress, we recommend:

Defining your service offerings

Managing personnel, providing superior service to your customers while finding efficiencies to decrease costs is a challenge, to say the least. It gets, even more, challenging without clearly communicating what the services you offer are. Without clearly documented and communicated processes and services, no one knows what is available. Using ITIL best processes and procedures within an ITSM tool allows you to provide a clear framework on who is what responsible for what, with the ability to track how your team is performing and overall customer satisfaction.

Creating a foundation for processes

IT leaders are continually challenged with doing more with less. Cut costs, increase ROI while working better, smarter, and faster. We have found that this all begins by laying the proper foundation for the IT organization which is defining and training the entire IT team on how everyone needs to be working. Investing in ITSM processes and best practices can and will provide significant ROI on tools and technology purchases.

Sharing service management

Once the proper foundation has been created within your IT group, spread some of the ITSM love! Aspects of a service desk can be utilized across multiple departments saving time and money while increasing efficiencies. This is where IT truly showcases the value it can bring organization-wide.

Thinking about SaaS

When it comes to finding efficiencies and decreasing costs, bringing on a SaaS tool reduces the responsibilities for managing and maintaining infrastructure, software versions, and pure man administration hours.