Role of IT shifting to service delivery

IT professionals nearly universally agree that the role of IT is changing across the enterprise, with service delivery taking greater prominence, according to a study by KPMG and ServiceNow.

A survey of 275 IT professionals at Knowledge14 shows that 93% believe that the role of IT is changing from being an administrator of infrastructure to becoming a driver of enterprise services.

According to the report, most departments in an enterprise are service providers to employees, other departments, partners or customers. As a service provider, a department needs to respond to requests from other parts of the business and also manage the process of onboarding new services.

Business users are increasingly demanding the same level of IT self-service they enjoy in their personal lives, in services including online banking, automated reservations and shopping. This puts pressure on IT to deliver automated enterprise-wide services, the report states.

Some IT departments have started to rise to this challenge by offering automated services through consumerised self-service portals. These services manage business processes, enact changes, address problems or procure information.

At the dawn of the PC era, technologies such as spreadsheets and email dramatically sped up work that was previously done on paper, the report states. But now IT is in need of a similar leap forward in efficiency to handle the explosion of enterprise services.

Nine out of 10 respondents agreed that multiple business processes now conducted over email could be better run by service automation. But 75% said their companies still rely on email for more than half of business processes, and only 2% said email is used for less than 25% of business processes.

Survey respondents nearly unanimously agreed that IT can leverage the familiar IT service model to help improve the quality and efficiency of non-IT services including HR and finance.

“IT teams have an unprecedented opportunity to deliver strategic value to the organisation by creating and managing the systems that improve enterprise-wide services,” the report states. “The advantage is that many IT departments already have implemented a systematic approach to delivering enterprise services with a proven IT service model.”

According to the report, 33% of respondents plan to roll out enterprise service automation within the next six months, and another 22% within the next year.

Most companies first introduce service automation for IT functions including password reset, procuring new computer equipment and resolving IT issues.

The majority (56%) of survey respondents agreed that HR was the best department outside of IT to start implementing service automation. This is because there are many repetitive tasks associated with the HR workflow, the report states.

When a new employee is onboarded, for example, HR goes through a standard list of actions - such as issuing network credentials, assigning a workspace and providing security clearance. These sorts of tasks can be automated.

“The key here is to move the many manual steps into a centralised outcome-focused service catalogue supported by request-fulfil process automation,” the report states. “Automated case assignment requests can be directed to a specific individual or cross-functional groups via rules. Reporting and dashboards allow HR managers to assess performance, prioritise actions and drive greater operational efficiencies and service.”

Although HR is considered the best candidate outside of IT for getting started with service automation, the approach can be easily applied to other departments, including legal, purchasing and facilities management, the report adds.

Image courtesy of Martin Terber under CC