For the SME, gaining value from an IT investment is paramount. Yet, despite this, it’s only relatively recently that the IT function has been subjected to the kinds of formal processes that govern other aspects of a business, such as sales, marketing, administration and finance.

Before this change, IT had a very reactive approach to service delivery, dealing with user requests and system issues as they occurred. Users within the business would call the IT department with a problem and technicians would endeavour to fix it as quickly as possible, with responsibility being passed from one person to another depending on the scale of the problem. Not only did this make it difficult for the IT department to track the history of an incident, it also made it impossible to prioritise jobs effectively. IT needed to change and the only way it could do this was by introducing formal management processes.

The IT director and manager has transformed from the “technical geek” into the “strategic thinker”. Like any other part of the business, IT needed to improve its business processes. Previous less structured approaches to service had put the IT-department under considerable pressure, making it impossible to set deliverable expectations and communicate them effectively to the organisation.

As a result, service management has become critical in enabling IT to take a business-driven approach to its management. IT directors and managers are increasingly looking to demonstrate the strategic business value generated by their department and deliver a higher quality service in line with the needs of the organisation it serves. The formalisation of IT processes has spurred development in the systems designed to manage the helpdesk function and service desk solutions are now playing a central role in facilitating, rather than dictating, business processes.

This shift has enabled IT departments to implement, monitor and manage service level agreements (SLAs), which are allocated according to an individual’s role and responsibilities and then cross-referenced with the applications/assets that they need to perform their core functions. In practical terms this means that the IT department is now better placed to ensure its services are aligned with the requirements of the organisation.

These systems can help IT managers to record and evaluate the number of incidents their users are experiencing. Before IT departments improved the management of their processes, they responded to isolated incidents which meant a problem couldn’t be identified because the incidents had no linkage or life-cycle. The introduction of the service desk has expedited this process, logging issues in a knowledgebase which is automatically searched when calls are logged to identify trends and previous resolutions. This ensures that time spent on more complex queries is maximised.

By taking a business-driven approach and becoming definable, repeatable and measurable, the IT department has come round in full circle from being a perceived drain on budgets to a true facilitator of the business.