Simon Kent, Head of Technical Business Services (EMEA)
Adam Holtby, a research analyst with Ovum, recently wrote a blog about how the service desk can help improve business relationship management.
This is a very interesting topic and having had a background in Customer Relationship Management and ITSM, the blend of these two management principals and frameworks into what is now termed Business Relationship Management makes compete sense.
In much the same way that people working in customer contact centres need intelligent software tools to support CRM, the service desk and service management software users need such capabilities in the ITSM tools of today. Whether that takes the form of easily seeing the transaction history of a supported business customer or simply being able to instigate any process based on information obtained from the customer.
They also need to be able to spot trends -- what customers are requesting and knowledge gained from outside of the organisation -- that can help to identify the potential to grow the service catalogue offerings. It should be possible for business customer to register their own devices with the BYOD model so that when the customer places a service request or incident with the service desk, the service desk is aware the device exists.
The Business Relationship Manager should be able to easily extract meaningful data, KPIs and trending from the system and use that to drive real time course corrections in the service delivery strategy.
In short, the ITSM tools of today should give service management organisations and Business Relationship Managers agility and the ability to deliver exactly what the business customers need today and moving forward.
