In today’s market, various tools for IT Service Management Solutions are available with excellent features and quality. Selecting the right IT Service Management (ITSM) tool and the vendor is a challenging task. Before planning for an ITSM tool, one needs to understand and agree on the organization’s requirement. Below are some points which need to be considered before selecting the ITSM tool for the business. This blog will help you with Tips to Choose the Perfect ITSM Tool for your Business.
1. Analyze the requirement to refine the search
There is a varied variety of ITSM tools available in the market. They have excellent attributes integrated with high technology. One needs to check the effectiveness of the tool for their business. Most of the well-established organizations have implemented all ITIL processes, but one needs to decide what all processes are needed to implement in their organization. This is important as ITSM Solution providers sell processes as modules to be purchased separately and might incur unnecessary burden to the organization.
Get the understanding of licensing and hosting options. One may have a separate production, staging, training, or development environment. Check the requirement of the licenses for the Organization. Before effectively comparing vendors on cost factor, one needs financial analysis across various scenarios
Following questions would be instrumental to find the right solution for the organization:
- Which solution is required for the organization: On-Premise or On-Cloud?
- What are the types of licenses available? How many and what kind of licenses are required?
- What is the budget for purchasing the licenses?
- What will be the long term requirement of licenses and it’s cost?
- Which standard should the tool be based upon: ITIL, COBIT or ISO 2000?
Every business is unique and so their challenges. Consulting firms like Emergys, with their holistic approach helps organization in choosing the right solution by understanding business challenges and unique requirement.
2. Take advice from ITSM Analyst’s expertise
One can review analyst reports such as the Gartner, Forrester to check the ITSM tool Delivery Capabilities before selecting the tool. By comparing the tools on the basis of its maturity while keeping one’s requirements and budget into consideration, one should be able to choose ITSM Solutions suitable for the Organization.
3. Analyze the core functionality of the ITSM Tool
Primarily, one needs to check the core functionalities available in the ITSM tool. The essential features are:
- ITSM Process Enablement
- User-friendly Interface
- Self-service
- Efficient Report Generation
- Automation
- Configuration, Customization, and Integrations
- Strong Vendor Relationship
- Document for all modules
4. Define the Reliability of the tool
While selecting the ITSM tool, one needs to check the long term usability and reliability. Following should be considered for the highest degree of reliability.
Capacity
The tool should be able to handle large volume of data. Performance should be unaffected with increase in data.
Availability
Uninterrupted availability is a pre-requisite. Organizations cannot afford the downtime of the tool as it will directly affect business.
Security
The ITSM tool should have capability of handling sensitive information about client and their activities.
Before purchase, confirm if the architecture of the tool is capable to control the access of critical data.
5. Find out a good provider
Choose an ITSM Service Provider who can provide end to end Service for the Project. This may include:
- Understanding the requirement of the organization and suggesting the number of licenses necessary for the required Modules.
- Installation of the ITSM modules.
- Providing training for adoption of the new tool.
- Implementation and quality support of the implemented tool.
- Providing complementary add on solutions for better business outcomes. For e.g. Emergys provide enterprise automation solution which integrates with any ITSM solutions.
In conclusion, the selection of the ITSM tool will be undemanding considering all the above points. In-depth analysis of the organization’s maturity level, requirement and budget before selecting tool is of paramount significance along with Vendor Analysis.