It has never been simple to choose an IT service management (ITSM) tool. Everything in IT always seems to be changing. So, it often seems difficult to decide on the technology, install it, and learn it before it gets perceived as obsolete.

However, modern agile ITSM tools are now capable of more than they have ever been, making their adoption more salient than ever. You may take advantage of platform-based features to design business-specific solutions, extend their use outside IT, and harness emerging artificial intelligence (AI)-based capability.

The choices may be overwhelming, but those same additional capabilities make evaluating and selecting the right ITSM product more difficult than ever before.

With that in mind, here are the steps to evaluating ITIL-compliant ITSM tools:

1.   Examine and Comprehend Your ITSM Requirements

Step one should be self-evident, but it gets frequently overlooked, which is extremely perplexing. The first step is to determine what you and other stakeholders expect from your ITSM projects. You are simply flying blind and merely pushing your own beliefs on your organization if you do not understand the business outcomes you are trying to attain.

ITSM and, more specifically, ITIL, has a negative reputation in many organizations. This negativity is almost always because IT has tried to force its views on the company. The created ITSM practices likely surround their own goals and ambitions, rather than taking the time to understand what the business wants to accomplish.

On the other hand, you can then determine the outputs from your ITSM practices to accomplish those objectives once you have met with the company and documented the required outcomes. Profit, client retention, and expansion are common measures of a company’s success.

Ultimately, these outcomes should aim to bring the company closer to realizing its mission. After you have identified these goals, you can look at how the outputs of your ITSM practices assist with attaining the goals.

Your ITSM outputs will probably look like this:

• Dependable Customer Online Services
• Reliable IT infrastructure
• Minimal business hours outages
• Speedy response time to major incidents
• Compliance to agreed SLA times

In the end, the capacity to offer these outputs is dependent on the inputs provided by your ITSM practices.

2.   Start Right Where You Are

Next, start where you are, as stated in the ITIL 4 guiding principles.

It is highly improbable that you will be beginning from scratch. Even if your company has not formally adopted a service management framework or installed a help desk or service desk solution, you can still manage IT outages and inquiries.

It might not be flawless, and it might not even be close to being efficient, but it will serve as a starting point from which you may develop. Looking at the outputs mentioned above provides a clear roadmap for the ITSM practices that companies may implement to assist in achieving these goals.

3.   Document and Record Present Processes

Effective change management strategies drive a solid IT infrastructure to a considerable extent. Thus, it is important to examine present procedures to see if they are documented and followed. Start by outlining how change gets managed currently, without clearly established processes.

Examine which aspects of the procedure are functioning and which are not once you have taken a good view and assessment of your current situation. Visualize your ideal end state, then map out the improvement path that will bridge the gap between now and then.

Keys to success in this stage include:

• Making small, incremental improvements and advancements
• Studying and Assessing these improvements
• Gathering feedback on these improvements
• Adjusting as needed
• Taking the next step toward making improvements that are higher on the priority list

Doing this will create a practice that works for your company and meets business needs.

4.   Integrate and Put Everything to Practice

Multiple strategies, including availability, capacity, and demand management, as well as your incident management approach, are required to provide high-availability online services to your clients.

The idea remains the same: start where you are, figure out what you are good at, progressively improve, and ask for feedback after each cycle.

Moreover, businesses should focus on the following techniques to achieve business requirements:

• Availability management
• Capacity management
• Change management
• Demand management
• Incident management
• Knowledge management
• Major incident management
• Problem management

Conclusion

Always keep in mind, however, that ITSM technology is not a panacea. Efficient internal procedures are essential for attaining efficiencies through technologies. Ultimately, the success of your tool will most likely be determined by your process planning, deployment, management, and improvement.

While there are many good ITSM solutions available today, it is critical to choose one that matches your specific and unique needs. More specifically, you will want an ITSM tool or ITSM tool vendor that:

• Provides the ITSM table stakes.
• It focuses on the delivered employee experiences.
• Allows ITSM capabilities to be extended to other business functions.
• Functions with other IT and enterprise systems and tools through streamlined integrations.
• Assists in improving capabilities over time.
• It is in line with service management best practices.
• Provides a compelling total cost of ownership and a clear path to generating profit.
• It allows for a quick time-to-value and continual changeability.
• Promises a long-term investment in new capabilities that will benefit your company.
• It desires a connection or relationship that gets centered on equal success.

In the end, the key to your organization’s success when choosing a new ITSM tool or platform is knowing what it needs in terms of business outcomes. Plus, it helps to have a strategy for quickly determining how well each ITSM tool under consideration will meet those business needs.

Finally, replacing your ITSM tool is a significant undertaking. It will most certainly be inconvenient, but it should benefit your coworkers and consumers significantly.

Consider Run2biz’s 4Biz Service Management Solution in this regard. Run2biz is a global information technology firm specializing in creating agile technology solutions that simplify and provide real value to businesses daily. With Run2biz, you can be confident that you will be able to implement digital transformation in a timely, consistent, and compatible manner, despite the ever-increasing speed of change.