With the shift to remote work models, government departments and agencies are rethinking how they deliver IT services.

IT is no longer a simple provider of services, but a strategic business partner that can help agencies and businesses do more with less, streamline service management and boost public sector productivity.

It goes without saying that since COVID-19, the need to digitise employee services and workflows has never been more critical.

Getting rid of silos

Traditionally, IT discussions have centered on functions like IT service management (ITSM), or IT asset management (ITAM). But these, and other core IT functions, are part of a bigger story – IT operations management (ITOM).

While ITSM is a set of processes to manage the design, plan, and delivery of services, ITOM focuses on digital infrastructure. ITOM is about the upkeep of applications, services, networking, storage, and connectivity elements that power an organisation’s business.

In short, ITOM is all about keeping services up and running optimally, which also helps improve ITSM.

It’s no surprise that IT teams are modernising their ITSM and ITOM tools and moving away from siloed solutions.

The best ITSM and ITOM tools provide fast and easy service management, including secure remote access tools, intelligent chatbots and virtual agents, and a consumer-grade service catalogue.

Challenges and opportunities

Legacy ITSM and ITOM solutions are typically siloed and take specialized skills to implement, maintain, manage, and upgrade, leaving you beholden to external developers.

They are characterised by lengthy implementation timeframes, frequent upgrade cycles and poor support systems. They’re often too complex for what’s actually needed, represent poor value for money thanks to hefty upfront and ongoing fees, and make for poor user experience.

Feature-overkill can create mind-boggling complexity with every feature becoming one more thing for users to learn, unlearn, and possibly misunderstand.

Yet many government agencies find themselves stuck in a suboptimal ITSM/ ITOM solution, which promises much but seldom delivers.

Improving ITSM with ITOM

The good news is that is doesn’t have to be this way. An AI-driven ITSM solution coupled with ITOM has many benefits including rapid incident management, service request management, efficiency, analytics, and integrated service channels.

It can help bust silos, contain costs and improve the experience for employees and customers alike.

California based software vendor Freshworks offers intelligent, cloud native ITSM and ITOM solutions, which help IT teams unify services and operations management, and deliver greater business value.

Built in AI

A growing number of software tools today have built-in AI technology and organisations no longer need to spend huge amounts of money building these tools from scratch.

AI has the potential to improve customer and employee experiences. AI-enabled tools can analyze huge data sets more quickly, provide early warnings for upcoming issues, and augment human decision making with relevant and meaningful insights.

Freshservice provides efficiency and agility through AI to create a contextual and intelligent experience that is available to Freshworks customers..

More information about aligning IT infrastructure to best practices, leveraging the power of analytics, streamlining and automating IT operations, delivering consumer-centric experiences and enabling scaling and integrations can be found here or at www.freshworks.com

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