2020 – 10 ITSM lessons learned and tips for 2021

In 2020, life merged with the workplace, technology no longer respected boundaries and new requirements shouted for urgent attention. Read on for the Sunrise view of key lessons for ITSM to assist with a successful 2021.

1. Adapt or fail. IT teams from North Wales Fire & Rescue Service and Moray Council shared how they adapted quickly to enable the logistics of home working with Sunrise ITSM.
   North Wales Fire & Rescue saw the need to adapt working practices quickly as the COVID emergency approached, moving the IT team to work from home in preparation for assisting the Service to support its residents. Recent work meant that users could be redirected to a self-service portal, making prioritisation easier and freeing support time for those requiring one-to-one assistance. When a new Logistics cell was created, it was easy to use the drag and drop workflow interface to build a new service in Sunrise ITSM, enabling the monitoring of tasks efficiently with full reporting. With parallels throughout the public sector, Moray Council had already been encouraging a ‘work from home’ initiative which was accelerated under the pandemic. A new ‘COVID’ service created in Sunrise tracks all requests and responses for immediate delivery, while reporting allows for ongoing planning and continuous improvement.
2. Reporting. From team performance to departmental feedback and strategic planning, if data’s not at your fingertips you’re limiting your hand. Community Integrated Care benefits from Power BI integration with Sunrise reporting for both day to day teams and performance management – KPIs, SLAs etc – and for reporting to other departments and the Board. Implementing 2 years’ worth of changes in 6 months, CIC rose to the challenge of assisting care at the frontline with ITSM reporting providing feedback and provision for planning.
3. Integration & collaboration. If we learned one thing about working remotely, it’s that no person, department, team or indeed organisation is an island. An ITSM tool with open connections to Teams, Jira, Slack improves communication no end, keeping all concerned parties in the loop as issues progress.
4. Enterprise Service Management. Service functions have more in common than many might think. Was 2020 the driving force to extend ITSM benefits across the business with ESM? Concorde Technology Group is a leading customer-focused service provider benefitting from supporting multiple service functions on a single platform.
5. Automation. If the process is repeated, automate. From simple to more complex uses, replacing lost or broken devices to processing leavers’ Right to be Forgotten requests, automation should be easy to set up and simple to use. With a drag & drop process builder, creating and updating workflows should be at your fingertips so you can focus on enabling the team and improving efficiency at every step.
6. Self-Service. Always on the to-do list, have we finally learned how to make it work and for both IT and its customers? Updating self-service in early 2020 put North Wales Fire & Rescue in a position to better prioritise and support its front-line and back-office co-workers.
7. UK or abroad, where’s your SaaS data held? A straight answer to this question isn’t as common as you’d expect, often hidden in the fogs of ‘Safe Harbor’ or alluding to wider geographical locations of cloud data centres. It might not matter to you where your data is, but it may well be important to your customers, and it’s better to have an answer to that question before it’s asked in anger. The Sunrise ITSM SaaS platform sits on the IBM Cloud and is stored in the IBM data centre near our offices in Chessington, UK, with Disaster Recovery in the UK as well.
8. ITIL. Still relevant? When reality strikes as the organisation has become more customer focused, our Guide to ITIL sheds light on the what and why of ITIL.
9. ITSM. Life might have seemed more simple when it was just the helpdesk, but the role of ITSM in the organisation reaches way beyond IT. Read our Guide to ITSM .
10. A true ITSM tool needs the breadth of functionality to hold up to the 2020 ITSM lessons. If your ITSM software is lacking in any capacity for these, we invite you to take a look at Sunrise.

Contact us for a demo, we’d be delighted to help you to a successful 2021.