As the business and technology landscape changes, so does that of corporate IT support. The enterprise IT Service Management landscape has changed beyond recognition over the past few years. Many organizations passed a tipping point several years ago where now every aspect of the organization needs technology support. In addition to supporting all systems, IT also needs to deploy and support Cloud/SaaS, mobile, advanced analytics, automation and virtualization.
All this comes with an increased volume of issues and tickets; and along with it, higher user expectations in terms of quality of service provided by IT departments. The challenge facing IT executives is to find innovative ways to keep support costs down while maintaining high levels of IT service quality.
In the last few years, the “shift-left approach” has emerged in the ITSM domain which emphasizes a more cost-effective and efficient model that drives incident resolution closer to the source. And yet, the incident process has remained largely unchanged and reactive for several decades.
So, what does it take for IT to prevent incidents from occurring in the first place? It’s all about detecting the source – and that issue is almost always experienced at the endpoint.
By closely monitoring activities at the endpoint and identifying certain conditions that would lead to an incident, IT can reduce call center tickets, keep end users happy and free up their time to focus on more strategic activities.
Below are best practices, IT departments can employ to prevent incidents that are just waiting to happen:
- Analyze IT consumption. Before any proactive resolution can occur, IT should assess what applications, programs and services are being consumed in real time and look for potential problems across that spectrum of IT assets.
- Identify and eliminate root causes. It’s important to identify all endpoints suffering from an identified symptom and take action to resolve them automatically before they impact the employees’ productivity.
- Empower employees and devices. In order to prevent call center tickets, it’s important to enable employees and devices with the capability to resolve issues on their own. Advanced self-help capabilities that automatically diagnose potential issues and contact employees for guided inputs to resolve them, eliminates the need for Service Desk intervention. New self-healing capabilities can automatically detect and repair many issues, such as performing an in-flight repair, or a corrupted configuration file.
- Gather employee feedback. IT should not only give employees a means to resolve issues on their own, but they also need to better communicate with them. They should work to understand employee sentiment about the effectiveness of the IT department and the frustrations of employees. Often, if this is gathered after an incident, it’s already out of mind, so it’s important to track this in real-time, as easily and quickly as possible for them
The very essence of IT is all about innovation – finding ways to do things better, faster and more efficiently. When incidents are out of sight and out of mind, IT has the opportunity to refocus on its core mission and become a strategic business enabler – lighting sparks of innovation instead of putting out fires.
Want to know how Nexthink can help you achieve instant detection and remediation of IT incidences?
The post After Three Decades – A Better Way to Manage and Prevent Incidents appeared first on Nexthink.