Best Practices to Run Your IT Services Like a CEO

You no longer merely operate “widgets” for “users” or simply take orders from the business. Maybe you’ve even shed the “information technology” moniker. By all measures, you run a successful, customer-oriented provider of technology services that differentiate your company in the marketplace.

But in today’s environment, it’s not enough for you to manage day-to-day service operations in the traditional ITSM sense. To be successful in today’s IT environment, you need to be empowered with information and insights that let you run your service like a CEO.

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SaaS-based applications help IT leaders make informed decisions about technology investments

Developing a business value perspective is an important piece of this equation. Quantifying the value you are delivering to the business allows you to change the conversation and provide higher value-added services and insights to your customers. Business value refers to delivering performance in a way that stakeholders find important. So, how should you be driving this conversation today?

Quantifying cost to communicate value

When you attach cost to the business’ consumption of services, you become empowered to change the conversation. Nontechnical stakeholders can understand how technology choices impact the bottom line and you are able to have a fact-based conversation about which services should continue to be supported and which should be retired.

Together, you can also determine where costs exceed the benefit being derived by your organization. This enables you to make credible recommendations about where to increase or decrease service resourcing and technology investments.

Discussing cost

When communicating cost, you’ll need to present the total cost of supporting a service or business entity, including all retained “hard” and “soft” costs. For example, your “service desk” services would include the total (fully loaded) cost of handling a call or email, including the allocated cost components for labor, and service desk applications.

Discussing quality

Quality refers to all the attributes that contribute to the value delivered by your services. These are the dimensions that stakeholders find important. For the service desk, this might include metrics such as average speed to answer, SLA breach ratio and customer satisfaction.

As an IT leader, you need to manage both the cost and quality of the services your team delivers. Your stakeholders, on the other hand, judge business outcomes. To drive a successful conversation, you need to adopt a decision-making framework for collaborating with them around business outcomes, with cost, quality, and value being central to that conversation

Download our executive brief that outlines best practices so you can begin assessing and communicating the value you are delivering with a pragmatic approach.

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