There are plenty of great things about working in ITSM — for example, working closely with end users, making their lives easier and solving problems. But we’d be lying if we said it was always “smooth sailing.” Working in ITSM can be very challenging, as these professionals deal with everything from security scares, to highly demanding end users, to nearly constant reactive firefighting on a daily basis.
All of these are major sources of stress. In fact, employee well-being is a significant cause for concern for these workers, with three out of five reporting the work negatively impacts their personal well-being. Moreover, the vast majority of these workers believe that working in ITSM is only going to get harder in the next several years.
According to several sources including Gartner, around 80 percent of IT projects, including ITSM, are considered failures by businesses, meaning they don’t meet their intended goals, often due to issues like cost overruns, missed deadlines and unmet expectations.
Resistance to change and end-user adoption is commonly cited as a reason that ITSM implementations fail.
Other things to consider:
– ITSM processes and technology can be complex. Techs not only have to develop competency with ITSM software but also develop a good understanding of the entire ITSM infrastructure environment.
– ITSM is seen as requiring continuous education for users in new processes, especially when moving to more advanced platforms.
– Failing to provide ongoing management and training can reduce ITSM effectiveness as business requirements and the ITSM tool itself change. On the other hand, a focus on the employee experience (through training) is very compelling for C-level executives who must fund ITSM, because it promotes stronger adoption.
Against this backdrop, the last thing you want to do is make these professionals’ lives even more stressful by introducing hard-to-use, complex ITSM software. Imposing the use of this software can be anxiety-provoking under normal circumstances, never mind when your professionals may be in the heat of the moment, desperately trying to solve a revenue-impacting incident that could be costing the organization as much as $5,600 per minute.
ITSM software, with incident management being one of its main pillars, can enable the rapid identification, notification, and resolution of critical application outages, and provide a clear, documented process to follow if and when things go wrong. In spite of this tremendous value proposition, many ITSM software implementations ultimately fail.
The problem is that, like other software deployments, ITSM solutions often suffer from a lack of user adoption. This is because people, by nature, are resistant to change. Sometimes, organizations and their training teams erroneously believe they can communicate once or twice about a new software implementation, deliver a round of training, and sit back and expect to realize software value. However, in prioritizing go-live, many training teams fail to properly support user adoption in the ensuing days and months, and adoption never reaches meaningful levels.
Now let’s look at the context of an incident. Any strong emotion that temporarily impairs our thinking — anxiety, fear, or anger, for example — can result in a “brain freeze,” or a temporary decline in cognitive functioning. So when an incident occurs, the ensuing panic among employees who are likely unfamiliar with the ITSM solution anyway, makes the situation that much more grim.
This is where digital adoption platforms (DAPs) come into play. DAPs serve as overlays residing on top of popular enterprise software (ITSM, ERP, CRM and more), providing in-app training and contextual guidance to application end users in order to help the organizations using DAPs increase proper use and enhance end-user adoption. Think reminders, alerts, announcements, and information bubbles, delivered right when the end user encounters friction, within the app, and precisely at the point of need. DAPs ease the learning curve and overcome the shortcomings of more traditional, rote training sessions by making training seamless and available on-demand.
While DAPs can be vital to overcoming human resistance to change, they are also pivotal for supporting smoother IT change management processes. In recent years, IT outages have continued to increase, as more people within an organization are empowered to make changes to IT services. In fact, a large majority of all incidents reported to an IT service desk are caused by change. Given the pace and frequency of IT change, context-driven guidance makes it easier for ITSM workers to implement these changes with fewer risks and disruptions, ensuring they are carried out much more smoothly.
And of course, DAPs can play a huge role in reducing all-important mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) Especially in times of strain, context-driven guidance can help ITSM users swiftly find information and efficiently resolve those IT issues they don’t necessarily encounter every day, by providing in-the-moment, step-by-step guidance. This leads to augmented user productivity and satisfaction while minimizing service disruptions.
DAPs are emerging as a cornerstone of the ITSM employee experience. But they can also play a key role in avoiding expensive downtime when a disruption occurs. DAPs can enhance every software, and pairing your ITSM solution with a DAP can be the key to both promoting a better ITSM employee experience while also harnessing the full potential of your software to maximize service delivery and uptime.
