The Top IT Service Desk Goals for 2021 and Beyond

What are your organization’s top IT service desk goals for this year? And next year? Have you been able to compare them with those of your peers in other organizations – as a sense check if nothing else? If this is something that you’d like to do, then this blog is for you. In it, I share what the SysAid 2021 State of Service Management Survey and Report found based on the input of over 1000 IT professionals. Please keep reading to find out more.

Here @Joe_the_IT_Guy reviews the list of the top IT service desk goals for 2021 according to a survey taken by 1000+ IT professionals. #servicedesk #ITSM Click To Tweet

And the survey said…

I’ll dive straight in with a list of the top IT service desk goals for 2021 according to the 1000+ IT professionals who took the SysAid survey:

1. Improve my team’s productivity through the use of automation (56%)
2. Enhance end-user experience (EX)/customer experience (CX) (51%)
3. Increase self-service adoption (45%)
4. Better visibility and analysis into performance, improvement, and outcomes (31%).

Interestingly, automation and CX/EX have exchanged places versus the top IT service desk goals for 2020.

It’s important to recognize the connective tissue between these goals

While it’s easy to list the above goals as separate entities, it’s important to understand that some cannot be effectively addressed and achieved without investments in other areas. For example, automation – when done right – is a key enabler of EX and CX improvements. Plus, your self-service capabilities are little more than a work capture mechanism and a knowledge base access point without automation to quickly progress workflow tasks, automatically provision required services, or provide immediate resolutions to IT issues. And, as a final example, improved visibility and analysis allow IT service desk leadership to identify and assess improvement opportunities related to CX or EX, perhaps via self-service improvements (that could then involve the addition of automation).

This connectivity is likely a big factor as to why automation has risen to the top of this list of top IT service desk goals for 2021.

In this article @Joe_the_IT_Guy looks at why #automation has risen to the top of this list of top IT #servicedesk goals for 2021. Click To Tweet

Appreciating the many benefits of automation

As mentioned earlier, hopefully the above list provides a good sense check of your IT service desk’s top goals for 2021. If you don’t already have a focus on automation for the year ahead, and beyond, then – unless you’ve already doubled down on automation in previous years – let’s see if this quick list of automation benefits resonates with you and your organization’s needs.

Some of the key benefits of automation include:

• Staff optimization – automation frees up people from repetitive and tedious tasks to work on more complex and rewarding things.
• Scaling – operations can be scaled and optimized through automation without the financial burden of increased employee numbers.
• Increased velocity – automation “works” faster than people. Plus, it’s available 24×7.
• Cost reduction – automation is a lower cost option relative to the human labor it replaces or augments.
• Better experiences – for both internal end users and external customers, with the increased velocity a key factor in this.
• Meeting end-user expectations of self-service – with the immediacy of provision or remediation elevating the effectiveness of self-service capabilities.
• Improved governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) – with audit trails of what happened and when, plus the outcome, available to support regulatory and compliance needs.
• Reduced human errors and the minimization of their business impact – because automation consistently does what’s needed of it (in line with its instructions).

If these benefits resonate with you, in terms of your organization’s needs, then you’ll find the following four automation success tips helpful.

@Joe_the_IT_Guy looks at eight clear benefits to using #automation for your #servicedesk Click To Tweet

4 automation success tips

1. Take a business value, rather than a technology-led, approach to automation. It’s important to automate based on the creation of business value and not on the available technology. Look at the value chain and how the addition of automation will deliver additional business value. This could relate to many things, depending on your organization’s strategic objectives. For example, improving customer experience, reducing costs, driving growth, or tightening up relative to security and GRC needs.
2. Get your service management basics right before automating. After all, automating a bad process, say, is simply speeding up the process to deliver its poor outcome more quickly. This also applies to self-service portals too. Where all the back-end automation in the world will likely not make up for a bad front end that your end users don’t want to use.
3. Don’t assess automation tool capabilities in isolation. Instead, there’s a need to consider automation technologies in the context of your existing IT ecosystem. For example, a new workflow automation solution needs to integrate with the existing automation/orchestration tools for activities such as software deployments and patching or the provision of cloud services. Ideally, in both instances, cradle-to-grave automation can be used to deliver what’s needed without any human involvement thanks to role-based, pre-approval policies.
4. Look to innovate while automating. The automation of manual processes or tasks is often seen as a like-for-like replacement of the existing human activities and steps. But this doesn’t necessarily exploit the key benefit of automation across “better, faster, cheaper.” So, use the opportunity of automation to identify improvements to the status quo that better serve business needs in terms of improved operations and outcomes.

You need to take a business value, rather than technology-led, approach to #automation says @Joe_the_IT_Guy. Click To Tweet

If you would like to find out more about what’s most important in the field of service management right now (and in the future), then please download the SysAid 2021 State of Service Management Report.