IT Business Management
What Is It And Why Does Your Business Need It?
What Is IT Business Management?
It's no secret that technology is a crucial component of any successful enterprise. Whether your company builds software systems or delivers packages, IT plays an important role in ensuring work is done efficiently and effectively. For large organizations, the IT department is a business in itself, responsible for delivering complex technology services to the rest of the company.
However, the IT department is more than a service provider. IT leaders and their teams are a driving force in business strategy. Through IT Business Management solutions, IT departments are empowered to plan, organize, develop, direct, and assess a company’s technology and resources in order to meet business needs and objectives. ITBM also includes the financial planning necessary to manage these resources.
What Is ServiceNow IT Business Management?
ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM) is a suite of products within the ServiceNow IT Workflow. The applications help IT departments demonstrate value to their enterprise to rationalize investments in technology and appropriately allocate resources. Additionally, ITBM enables IT and business teams to collaborate on the assessment and prioritization of technology requests in order to efficiently deliver solutions to the organization. With ServiceNow ITBM, IT teams are empowered to make educated decisions that drive enterprises towards their organizational goals. In addition to this, IT teams can become more agile and responsive to the changing needs of their company through the use of ServiceNow ITBM.
Why Does Your Business Need ServiceNow IT Business Management?
For large enterprises, IT Business Managers have a lot on their plate. Responsible for ensuring their company’s technology investments are operating at maximum efficiency, managing IT staff, maintaining and building new technology solutions, and balancing the IT budget, teams can leverage modern ITBM solutions to demonstrate that IT is an important function to any successful business.
Let’s consider a traditional organization that is using legacy systems to manage its technology needs. Enterprise executives are reviewing financials for the upcoming year and reach out to the IT department regarding the technology budget. The ITBM team knows that it’s finally time for the company to upgrade its security software. The organization has stalled on the upgrade knowing it comes with a large price tag but the upgrade has become critical after a recent security breach within the industry.
Without comprehensive data at their fingertips, the IT team has to manually gather and analyze data to conduct a cost-benefit analysis and prove the need for the upgrade. The IT manager spends the entire week collecting data (that is frankly too in-the-weeds for the executive to do in the first place) and struggles to advocate for the essential security update.
The executive team can grasp the need for the upgrade but cannot justify the expense to investors without the proper information. They notify the IT department that they will try to carve out one-third of the money they need for the update, but they can’t make any promises. This result leaves the company prone to a costly data breach, strains IT personnel in the future, and simply kicks the security can down to the curb until further notice.
If the company were to prioritize IT as a primary function to business success and adopt ServiceNow’s ITBM solution, the outcome of this story would have been very different. The IT Business Manager could have swiftly and automatically gathered the data necessary to process the executive’s request, clearly justified the need to invest in the security update, and provided a clear and concise plan for delivering the upgrade across the enterprise. ServiceNow ITBM would have saved the enterprise significant time and money and, most importantly, prevented unnecessary security vulnerability.
The Benefits Of ServiceNow IT Business Management
ServiceNow ITBM focuses on improving the alignment of business services, accelerating service delivery, and offering comprehensive financial visibility. The application helps you better manage demand, resources, and budgets so IT can optimally support business operations and needs.
With ServiceNow ITBM you can:
Gain visibility into projects
application portfolios, portfolio investments and business strategies to assess the value of IT services being delivered
Reduce
bottlenecks
and manage operational work in one location to improve efficiency and agility
Flexibly
manage
and execute evolving projects by connecting your investment plan to your work plan
Analyze the
impact
of the risks and associate existing RIDAC records for your demands and projects.
ServiceNow IT Business Management Applications To Implement For Your Business
How exactly can ServiceNow ITBM support your IT operations? Let’s take a look at a few of ServiceNow’s ITBM applications.
Performance Analytics
Performance Analytics can offer enterprises detailed insights into company success, shortfalls, and value. Using business data, performance analytics measures key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the progress and results of a job function over time. With this information, businesses can make informed decisions to work toward achieving key objectives and goals.
What is ServiceNow Performance Analytics?
ServiceNow Performance Analytics is a powerful application designed for reporting and analyzing business performance. The application provides instant insight into current data as well as trends over time with responsive and interactive dashboards. With over 600 out-of-the-box KPIs, Performance Analytics offers agents tools and dashboards for measuring success. The application gives managers the data they need to make swift and accurate executive decisions.
Benefits of ServiceNow Performance Analytics
Leverage real-time
insights
to prioritize business goals and improve decision-making
Monitor
performance
to achieve new insights, drive continuous improvement, and anticipate trends
Pin-point where
automation
and self-service can improve performance
Share the Wealth
Performance Analytics
In ServiceNow
Benefits of ServiceNow Demand Management
Inform executive
decision-making
based on strategic requests
Improve
visibility
so IT teams and managers can effectively organize and forecast demand requests
Build a single system of record and integrate with delivery
applications such as ServiceNow Change Management, Agile Development, and Project Portfolio Management
Demand Management
IT executives receive a lot of demand from other departments, such as requests for new services or enhancements to existing ones. Demands can come from a variety of sources and have varying degrees of priority. Demand management seeks to effectively and efficiently handle these incoming requests while also forecasting the demand for future requests.
What Is ServiceNow Demand Management?
ServiceNow Demand Management offers a comprehensive view and centralized location to manage strategic business requests for IT services. The application streamlines the investment decision process for new products, services, repairs, and enhancements. Within Demand Management, businesses can generate and communicate new ideas to support corporate initiatives to improve your enterprise.
Managers can assess, manage, and forecasts demand for products so their IT teams can proactively support their colleagues and improve IT services. The application can also create demand scorecards that are displayed in configurable bubble charts, enable easy demand prioritization.
Share the Wealth
Demand Management
In ServiceNow
Resource Management
Resource management is the planning and development of an organization’s resources such as human resources (staffing), financial resources, or inventory. Within IT, people are often the most expensive component of the department’s budget. Staffing can also be a complex process for IT teams as technology demands can change rapidly and employees may have varying skill sets. It’s important that organizations adopt a modern resource management solution to properly staff tech needs.
What Is ServiceNow Resource Management?
ServiceNow Resource Management enables resource managers to create resource plans, request and assign staff to projects, and track IT team availability. Managers can leverage the application’s scheduling features to allocate resources to tasks for various project types, while users can easily see what tasks they are assigned to and with whom. Automated notifications and approvals improve collaboration among resources and intelligent workflows help both managers accurately estimate resource need. With built-in reporting and dashboards, organizations can gain valuable insight into resource allocations and requests, improving business operations and resource decision-making.
Benefits of ServiceNow Resource Management
Accurate real-time
views
of resource availability enable accurate resource allocation and faster resolution of requests
Precisely align
resources
with requests via calendars and schedules, improving workflows between resources and management
Deliver
consistent
resource management to every operational and project-related IT task
Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
What Is ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management?
ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a suite of ServiceNow applications that improves IT development. PPM includes the following applications: Demand Management, Resource Management, Project Management, Program Management, and more. Previously known as Project Portfolio Suite, PPM provides a central location to view demands and projects as well as to plan a portfolio and track its progress. With the portfolio workbench, you can easily perform all aspects of financial planning and budgeting.
Benefits Of ServiceNow Project Portfolio Management
Align portfolio
investments
strategy, and team structures to achieve business goals
Improve business
agility
and executive decision making with integrated ServiceNow applications
Gain
visibility
into all your demand, resources, and project portfolios in one location to improve productivity
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PPM Adoption: How To Build A Phased Approach For Engagement Management
Application Portfolio Management (APM)
What Is ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management?
ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management (APM) builds a comprehensive inventory of the applications an organization is using and identifies technical gaps and redundancies to reduce application costs. By consolidating applications within the same business function, APM helps IT Business Managers identify the need to sunset an application, upgrade to the latest version, or adopt a new application altogether.
Application Portfolio Management also uses data from ServiceNow solutions like IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, and Security & Risk to extend the depth of information and provide a broader ecosystem to make technology decisions.
Benefits Of ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management
Simplifying
IT
infrastructure and proactively manage technology needs
Reduce IT
costs
by identifying and eliminating redundant applications
Invest in viable
technology
solutions and services that will support enterprise objectives and goals
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How To Cut Back On Organizational Excess With Application Portfolio Management
Agile Management
Originating from the tech industry, agile management (sometimes written Agile) is an approach to project management and development that advocates for adaptive planning, evolutionary development, and continuous improvement. Scrum and Kanban are two popular Agile frameworks in the project management field.
ServiceNow offers two powerful Agile Management Solutions: Agile Development and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
What Is ServiceNow Agile Development?
ServiceNow Agile Development is an application that manages and tracks software development life-cycles using an incremental and flexible approach. Agile Development manages scrum or waterfall development and helps manage the backlog of tasks.
What Is ServiceNow Scaled Agile Framework?
ServiceNow Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) helps organizations apply agile and lean principles to their enterprise in order to develop and deliver more successful software products in less time.
These two applications enable IT Business Managers to manage scrum, waterfall, or hybrid development efforts in highly collaborative environments.
Benefits Of ServiceNow Agile Development and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe):
Manage stories
across sprints
backlogs, and epics with an easy-to-use interface
Increase
visibility
into the entire software development lifecycle from inception through testing and deployment
Optimize
resources
by gauging and forecasting work levels to determine future project velocities
Implementation Services for ServiceNow IT Business Management
It’s time to prioritize your enterprise’s technology needs and offer your IT department a powerful ITBM solution.
Whether you’re already using ServiceNow or are looking to migrate to a cloud-based solution, GlideFast Consulting will maximize the full potential of your ServiceNow IT Business Management implementation through tailored solutions and process expertise. As an Elite ServiceNow partner, GlideFast Consulting helps businesses leverage the full value of their ServiceNow investments.
Partner with our team of experts to modernize your ITBM solutions and improve the alignment of your business services, accelerate IT service delivery, and gain comprehensive financial visibility. Our expert team of developers and architects have unique perspectives and skillsets when it comes to implementing, integrating, and managing a ServiceNow IT Business Management solution that will transform your organization.