Advancing to the Future of Service Management – Part 2: Key Considerations

Written by: Imran Khan, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at BMC Software, Inc.

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In Part 1 of this series, I shared the core components for advancing to future-ready service management. In Part 2, I will go into the five considerations that are key to your analysis before kicking off your fulfillment and consumption initiatives. Having reviewed and analyzed these considerations, your transformation will be optimized for success.

Key Considerations for Advancing to Future-Ready Service Management

Our BMC Customer Success team has been helping BMC clients define their evolution to AI-enabled service management as well as implementing cognitive automation solutions to support their journey to an autonomous digital enterprise. In doing so, we have identified these five key considerations to advance the service management capabilities of your organization:

1. 1. Clarify Your Use Cases for Cognitive Services: Many organizations struggle to define and articulate use cases and priorities. For most, the idea of an automation- and AI-enabled (let alone autonomous) use case is completely new. The wrong focus can prove to be challenging and costly. We work with our customers to prioritize use cases, helping to ensure that use cases demonstrate value once the cognitive service is launched. More complex use cases can be selectively added to your transformation approach once you prove out the initial capabilities.
   2. Define Value from the Start: Build a plan focused on real business outcomes that achieve value incrementally. For example, an online retail customer we work with wanted to eliminate calls to the service desk to reduce cost and derive greater value from cognitive automation technology. This is made possible by giving end users multiple channels to make inquiries to the service desk without making a call. That shift to cognitive technology increases the productivity of IT as well as the users by getting responses quickly. By defining this type of metric upfront and then tracking KPIs on the value throughout your transformation journey, you will be able to demonstrate real benefits, ensure accountability, and indicate progress toward goals for overall ROI.
   3. Plan Your Data Model: Data underpins autonomous service and therefore careful planning of your data model needs to happen early on. Not all data sources are created equal and it will be essential to clarify what data is good and what data is bad for use by chatbots and other solutions. Bots can learn bad behavior, so ensure you have great confidence in the quality of the information provided. Autonomous service management requires a new way of thinking about, and managing, data. Quality information to support a quality service management environment is a key to future success.
   4. Design with the End User in Mind: The end user experience matters most and is pivotal to advancing your service management capabilities. It’s critical to engage often with end users during your evolution. End user representatives need to participate in the development and a broader group should also be part of a showcase during the design and build phase. This is critical so that they can provide feedback, which goes a long way to preventing blind spots as well as helping ensure a positive end user experience at launch. To achieve a strong, positive end user experience requires being open to new possibilities. For example, we know that business users expect the same ease of access as in their personal life, where things are available from any device and channel. They don’t want to be tied to one system or user interface. You will need to think through and identify these types of expectations and make them core to your end user experience approach.
   5. Plan for Organizational Change: To fully advance and make the above elements take hold, an organization needs to shift not only its technology and operations, but also its people’s skills and mindsets. That evolution requires a plan. The enterprise needs to embrace doing new things in new ways. This innovation-first mindset should be a shared message across the enterprise. Many times, organizations need to “burn the ships” of the past in order to embrace new ways of thinking. This may be necessary to achieve real results in the shortest timeframe. If so, that example needs to come from the top of the organization to ensure buy-in at all levels.

It’s 2020, which means becoming an expert in and getting your organization to embrace cognitive automation technologies is urgent. While at the start this transformation may appear to be too big of a leap, do not be deterred. Instead, begin embracing the qualities and tools of autonomous service management in your priorities and draw on the energy and expertise of those who are excited to find new ways to deliver service. By focusing on the fulfillment and consumption sides of service, you can build your team and select areas for focus. Next, build your strategy and execution leveraging the five components above to achieve pilots and metrics that prove the value future-ready service management can deliver. With regular emphasis and successful pilots, adoption of AI and automation capabilities in anticipation of autonomous service management will no longer be a dream but a growth trend gaining momentum inside your organization.