How Digital Innovation is Driving the Modern Service Desk

A few weeks ago, I met with one of our large retail banking customers.  During this meeting we discussed how important it was for the bank and its 100,000+ employees to have a modern, innovative, user-friendly experience when interacting with I.T.  Their desire to deliver innovation for their employees is rooted in a requirement to drive concurrent gains in productivity and employee satisfaction.

Service Management is clearly a core requirement to anyone interested in achieving these sorts of outcomes.  To do this we must drive beyond new user-experiences, new technologies, and new delivery models.  We must deliver innovation around digitally enhanced services beyond the service desk and into the business.

We are heavily focused on a more innovating and forward-looking approach to IT service management; an approach that builds digital innovation use cases into the service management platform so customers can deliver digital services faster, smarter, and with an amazing user experience.  Because of this, we find ourselves uniquely positioned to help our customers deliver digital innovation into their businesses

The range of potential digital services is so broad it’s sometimes hard to imagine.  We have spent countless hours working with customers who are pushing the envelope, as well as analyst whose full time focus is looking for innovation trends.  The result of this is that we have identified four key areas where our customers are delivering digital services today:

• Digital Workplace: is about fast, effective, and elegant ways of working anywhere. It involves new modes and methods of working, not just about making offices more mobile or adding digital services to the workplace, it is about thinking very differently about how we optimize the workforce and drive a new level of productivity leveraging digital technologies.  For example, with our MyIT solution we leverage context about an employee to deliver information and resolutions to problems proactively without the need to ever fill out a form.
• 360° Customer Engagement: is about empowering and automating contact with customers across the lifecycle. When users can serve themselves and have direct access to the right people through digital technologies, they get not just a faster service, but a much better service delivered a fraction of the cost of traditional customer support and delivery models.   Leveraging our Remedyforce platform in concert with CRM capabilities of Salesforce.com (SFDC) we are able to provide better visibility and context about a customer who may be experiencing an I.T. related issue.
• IoT-Scale Automation: in the digital age, automation needs to extend beyond data center or networked assets to things like the objects e.g smart-meters or IP connected medical equipment. IT organizations are challenged to create proactive, predictive services using Internet of Things as a springboard. The solution is IoT sensors that identify service needs and trigger policy-based service requests and workflows. With BMC’s ADDM solution you can discover technology beyond the data-center and have it automatically modeled in your change management database.    For example a healthcare organization being able to discover, model and monitor IP connected refrigeration devices – and being able to automatically deploy a technician when temperature thresholds are exceeded.
• Digital Marketplace: is about supporting multi-sourcing for acquisition of products and services, internally and externally. The solution is a platform to deliver a marketplace of services offered internally to employees and externally to business partners, enabling the upsell and monetization of premium services. The benefits include an improved service brand, transparency, governance and control and new revenue growth.

Digital innovation use cases are deeply embedded in the business organizations driving them.  HR for digital workplace, operations for internet of things, or support and marketing for customer engagement.  However, IT knows how to automate complex processes, bring visibility, governance and controls around service delivery.  In the age of digital innovation those services need to be delivered with zero downtime and an intuitive self-service user experience that enables breakthroughs in human productivity and scale.

IT organizations must evolve to support digital services quickly and easily with built-in ITIL best-practices.  Automation, performance at scale and an intuitive intelligent user experience are the necessary foundations for delivering digital services.  It is simply not possible to add more people to manage a billion devices or a networked digital marketplace.

As a result, BMC has invested in a digital service management platform that empowers IT to drive digital innovation, leveraging the same ITSM excellence and modern service desk that the IT organization uses to scale and automate IT processes.

We are the first in the industry to build a leading platform optimized for Digital Service Management so that IT organizations can roll out digital workplace initiatives, create 360° Customer Engagement, or consider digital marketplaces as a way to deliver services to employees and customers faster.

Digital innovation is the new operating model for business, whether you’re a start-up in a garage, or a Fortune 500 bank trying to integrate the needs of thousands of employees with often conflicting requirements. This level of engagement requires not only sophisticated yet intuitive technology, it requires breadth and depth of service offering and a partner who understands the technology system with enough perspective to anticipate and help you drive change.