Exploring Digital Service Management (DSM)
The evolution of Service Management
In past blog articles, we have discussed the relationship between `traditional ITSM`, Agile, and DevOps and how these approaches can help us fully understand business and customer needs.
As organisations are reaching an ever-increasing level of digital maturity, leading to increased delivery times to market, the need to evolve traditional Service Management approaches to make them more effective and support these Agile working methods is becoming more urgent. This post introduces Digital Service Management (DSM) and how this concept can help you achieve best practices that support high velocity delivery and continuous deployments.
What is DSM?
It’s easier to say what DSM isn’t rather than what it is. DSM doesn’t mean a set of new processes, procedures, or practices to compete with ITIL 4, IT4IT, Agile Service Management, etc. Not at all. DSM is, the exploitation of technology, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IOT), Cognitive Computing and more, to manage the delivery of the services consumed by customers, stakeholders, and users.
This doesn’t mean you will suddenly become ‘digitally mature’ by standing up a self-service portal or automating workflow and process activities. It means evolving and modernising the IT Service Management processes that you currently use.
A New Approach
IT Service Management processes within organisations tend to be implemented project-based and often end up as manual, reactive, and not fit-for-purpose. DSM enables these processes to become proactive and `easier on the eye`, by leveraging technologies that provide predictive capabilities, such as AI and ML. Can you imagine a world where you don’t have to rely on somebody to spot an issue, and where technology can help to spot problems before something fails? That’s what DSM can do.
Furthermore, DSM allows tiered support models, typically in place in most organisations, to be replaced by a direct support model. The tiered support model recognises that the `symptoms` might not equate to the root cause of an issue and relies on a first-level team to triage the issue first and then route it to the appropriate team. This team investigates the issue further and attempts to resolve the incident. If they can’t, they will route the issue to a third level of support or to another team that they think can better fix it. This can result in extended resolution times as tickets bounce between teams before finding the right home.
With the direct support DSM model, the technological tools route the issue automatically to the right team based on an understanding of the current state of the environment and lessons from similar issues that have been seen in the past. This ensures that issues are resolved by the correct team efficiently and effectively, hopefully before customers and users experience them.
Finally, the experience of the customers and users will change. Rather than dealing with a human Service Desk agent when trying to report an issue, they will engage with ChatBots and Virtual Agents that will use AI and ML to simulate the experience of dealing with an individual. This ensures that the user is dealing with ‘someone’ who has a more complete knowledge of the environment and can resolve their issue quicker than being routed through different support teams. If the technological agent lacks the answer, the user will be routed to a person.
AI and ML aren’t investments that work out of the box and immediately provide the expected benefits. They must be fed the correct information and gradually learn from ‘experience’. The long-term benefits of using technology to deliver DSM will significantly outweigh the initial implementation hurdle.
DSM doesn’t fix everything. Poorly designed processes remain poorly designed processes. DSM will emphasise where these poor processes are in place. Skills will need to be in place to ensure that the DSM technologies continue to learn and develop to provide the expected benefits. The DSM tools don’t just work; they must be maintained and continually developed.
DSM will transform Service Management, not replace it.
If you are at a stage of your service management journey where you realise your approach needs to change as it no longer meets expectations, please get in touch. We can relate to the challenges you are facing and can work with you to help you move forward confidently into the digital world.