Government agencies are becoming increasingly reliant on their IT infrastructure and the data it processes, saves, and distributes. The quality and cost-effectiveness of IT services and their administration are becoming more and more critical to performance in today’s government climate, which is becoming increasingly competitive and cost-focused.
As such, agencies should consider innovative technology platforms providing IT Service Management (ITSM) for governments to meet the public sector demand.
What is ITSM?
IT Service Management (ITSM) means administering IT services to provide value to customers. It encompasses everything from planning and managing IT system upgrades to ensuring that they don’t affect daily operations.
Why is ITSM Important for Governments?
Governments invest large sums in technology in the public sector, which is generally beneficial to agencies looking to modernize their IT digital services to engage citizens better. However, by allocating more money to technology spending, government IT teams are being pushed to provide more support than resources may allow. Furthermore, many teams still manage legacy systems that cannot handle ever-increasing demand.
As a result, IT can quickly become overloaded, and governments must improve IT maturity in project and service management to keep pace.
Seven Benefits of ITSM For Governments
While ITSM implementation carries many potential benefits, seven of particular significance are as follows:
1. Enhance Operational Efficiency
Improving operational efficiency is one of the main benefits of IT Service Management. Most agencies don’t have enough hours in a day to complete all of their tasks. However, by using service management best practices, your organization will be able to:
- Significantly enhance workflows
- Increase the value of your existing resources
2. Reduce Spending
IT infrastructure and operations represent a large chunk of many agencies’ budgets. As the agency grows in size and maturity and requires additional IT services and equipment, this number will only rise.
Organizations can decrease their dependence on some employee tasks by automating manual procedures and tedious work processes with ITSM, freeing current employees from tiresome, repetitive activities, and applying their abilities in other functions.
3. Boost Employee Productivity
Staff productivity improves when operations are running smoothly. IT administrators can use the principles and standards from ITSM programs to establish a baseline for measuring both:
- The quality of the services provided
- Team members’ ability to work together
Due to a structured service management approach, agencies will also have access to a formal incident response process. This aids in:
- Shortening the time it takes to recover from a service outage
- Reducing the average time it takes to respond to an occurrence
4. Improve Public Sector Relations
Public sector relations will likely improve as operations become more efficient, and employee productivity improves.
Citizens will notice benefits in their regular operations due to fewer service disruptions and faster replies, as well as fewer service outages and increased availability.
5. Provide Scalability
Organizations of all types – public and private – frequently face scalability issues. The flexibility to increase resources as demand changes or reduce use to limit expenses is critical for staying afloat while minimizing service disruptions. Cloud solutions are frequently quite beneficial for increasing scalability because they enable firms to add or remove IT resources as needed.
On the other hand, true scalability demands more than a cloud solution. It’s also critical for a company to have flexible procedures, processes, and governance to get the most out of its IT assets.
6. Minimize Risk
The risks associated with digital change can seem disastrously high for agencies that execute transformations–especially if poorly planned and inadequately communicated to team members.
The possibilities of substantial service outages significantly decrease with ITSM. The systemized rules and processes work together to communicate to the public throughout the change management process.
7. Improve Visibility
ITSM structures give employees and managers a clearer picture of completed and outstanding tasks.
This transparency enables:
- Team members to track each other’s progress and understand where they are in the process
- Managers to monitor a project’s progress (which is especially beneficial as more teams now work remotely)
ITSM also provides better data and analytics insights, allowing organizations to see:
- Which workflows require improvement
- What duties consume too much time and resources
- Additional processes and tasks that could be automated
Let Cask and ServiceNow Help You Improve Public Sector Relations
ITSM offers many benefits that grow in value as technology advances and matures. ServiceNow IT Service Management can help government agencies go from functional to extraordinary by increasing operational efficiencies, reducing risk, increasing staff productivity, and bettering interactions with the citizens they serve.
Request a quote today and learn how Cask and ServiceNow can help you implement ITSM for governments to reduce costs, boost efficiency and productivity, and improve interactions with the public.
