Competitive Advantage with ITSM Analytics

An exceptional Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) manager achieves outstanding efficiency, high service levels, and substantial competitive advantage. ITSM analytics is essential to reach all those goals. If a manager does not harness analytics, they will fall behind the competition of the managed services market. Furthermore, a powerful tool or set of tools can unlock tremendous value, create a competitive advantage and accelerate business expansion.

There are hundreds of analytics solutions out there. The following map, borrowed from chiefmartec.com, provides a way to outline the digital ops space:

Core Segments of the Landscape

After analyzing 100+ ITSM operations at CKM, we have identified at least seven core segments that deserve special attention. They are at the heart of most businesses, and analytics has proven to drive solid and actionable insights to unlock value.

• Workforce Management: enables planning and control of staffing and schedules of the people doing the work
• Contact-Center Solutions: presents patterns around service metrics from service desk interactions
• Service Management: A platform that leverages a ticketing or work-item logic to enable coordination across the organization
• Process/Task Mining: analyzes the sequence of steps the teams follow to deliver the business’ promise

• AI Ops: monitors technology stacks and finds patterns around the issues and work generated

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA): enables automating the digital work, following logical rules and a predefined set of inputs and outputs.
• Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: enables exploration of the data in any domain through slicing, dicing, and aggregating the data. In addition, it allows creating custom dashboards with basic metrics

What Is Missing

Each segment of the products above offers valuable insights, albeit with limited scope. For example, the workforce management systems gather data from telephony systems but have no visibility into service management tickets that a call might require to follow up on the work. On the other hand, process mining solutions will capture service management data but provide no insights into work effort related to the origination of a case.

Fragmentation of data systems aside, ITSM is a complex business where managers need to see the patterns of opportunities but don’t have time to sift through data to find them like they would in a BI Tool.

Enter Intelligence Engines 

An emerging segment called Intelligence Engines fills the gap described above. Intelligence Engines connect to multiple systems and glean insights across the ITSM operation, from end to end. For example, they allow calculating combined service metrics at the interaction and case level. They also enable the user to discover how work patterns from a contact center can have an unexpected impact on downstream processes. Furthermore, it can collate the demand from all the work areas, providing a more accurate measure of the required staffing levels.

Additionally, an intelligence engine is continuously sifting through the data and will alert the managers to any new insight coming in, in real-time. The real-time component is fundamental because it allows timely decision-making, saving operational costs, mitigated risks, and improved service quality.

CKM’s T-K product is at the forefront of the intelligence engine world. Linking your disparate data sources provides a holistic picture of how the work moves throughout your organization, filling in the gaps that existing ITSM analytics tools leave. This unlocks even more value from your operational data and enables all the functionalities mentioned above. To find out more, read about how this unlocked a 10 x ROI for one of our customers (https://ckmanalytix.com/ckm-customer-journey-fixing-a-broken-100m-automation-program/), or contact us for a demo.  

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