4 Ways Codeless Architecture Enables ITSM Initiatives to Scale

In addition to being hindered by resource and costs restraints, ITSM leaders are perpetually pressed for time. In my twelve years in IT, I’ve never run into an IT leader who has an abundance of time. Managing critical applications and IT services requires timely coordination of people, processes, and tools, with adherence to service level and operational level agreements.

So, it’s no surprise ITSM leaders look at you as if you are crazy when you bring up the topic of new initiatives. They immediately think about the things they don’t have, including time to develop and scale a new initiative. These three different stages are important, and most initiatives go awry when it’s time to scale. In fact, most initiatives rarely leave the pilot stage because new demands and new objectives take priority. Because time is a finite resource, many great ideas and concepts flame out.

But, what if IT could reduce the time and associated costs spent running the business in order to devote more time to growing and transforming the business? The exercise would require an understanding of how IT spends their time, and then a plan for how to pragmatically reduce “run” time, so to increase “grow” and “transform” time, which is the true mandate for almost all IT organizations across the globe. Industry insight into how time is spent can be found in Gartner’s IT Key Metrics Data 2016: Key Applications Measures: Application Support, which indicates almost 60 percent of application support activities are dedicated to bug fixes, minor enhancements, and technical upgrades. The same analysis indicates 70 percent of application support is comprised of development and service management and administration resources.

Tweet this: How can #IT reduce costs to run the business to amplify more productivity for growing and transforming? 

The net takeaway: ITSM and development resources spend the majority of their time fixing things that are broken, adding functional enhancement to current code, and handling the planning, coding, testing, communications, documentation, and implementation associated with version upgrades. This doesn’t even factor in the opportunity costs associated with your developers. Wouldn’t your business (and you yourself) prefer to work on creating applications that grow and transform the business? 

ITSM solutions are just that: applications – the majority of which, unfortunately, require care and feeding at a level that stalls or halts ITSM new initiatives or, perhaps worse, prevents them from scaling. The need for significant development and operations resources required to configure or customize an ITSM application is often a non-starter, which brings us back to the look ITSM leaders give you when you talk about growth and transformation. But, what if programming, development and scripting wasn’t necessary to configure or customize the ITSM solution? What if the configurations and changes you make to the application were never adversely effected by upgrades? What types of new and unique initiatives would you pursue? What challenges would you take on knowing you had a powerful and flexible solution that empowers IT to truly lead? This is what codeless architecture is -- the ability to configure your ITSM solution without writing a single line of code. It is, in short, a game changer.

Let’s look at four of the top areas in which “codeless” can help you grow and transform your business more rapidly and reliably:

IT Self-Service

One of the challenges IT leaders have had with IT self-service for the last decade relates to the ability (or lack thereof) to create a compelling business experience. Often, IT organizations need an expensive CMS design resource to do this – but what if you didn’t? What if an administrative resource with a list of requirements could build a compelling self-service experience without writing or touching a single line of code? Better yet, what if what was created didn’t break upon version upgrade? When IT self-service initiatives scale, it means IT gets back time and money they didn’t have before. The most recent HDI Support Center and Practice Salary reported that the median cost per service desk ticket is $16. When executed properly, IT self-service can reduce contact volume by as much as 40 percent, accounting for the “How-To” questions, service requests, and password resets that comprise that percentage. Do the math for your organization. 

IT Knowledge Management

The aforementioned Support Center and Practice Salary stated 10 percent of IT organizations actually reduced ticket volumes last year. The number one factor was the implementation of Knowledge Management, which has traditionally been an initiative that goes awry because the IT organizations fail to assign the roles and responsibilities necessary to implement and leverage a formal process. A codeless platform can help reduce administrative and maintenance burden, which not only opens up opportunities to document issues better, but to share and utilize information appropriately.

Third-Party Integration

When IT organizations list their must-have technology solutions to provide efficient IT support, very rarely do all the technologies come from the same vendor. Application integration is required to make effective use of the full IT service and IT operations management portfolio, as opposed to cumbersome tasks and processes that involve technicians working in multiple systems to consume data and context. When you don’t require software configuration or development to build out third party integrations, you can quickly scale the ability to remove data silos.

Enterprise Service Management

Most significantly, IT organizations are applying IT service management principles to other areas of the business. Traditionally, this requires skilled development resources to build. Often, what is built breaks when the IT organization upgrades to the next version. With codeless design, you can rapidly configure your ITSM platforms to prototype and ultimately deliver capabilities to departments such as human resources, facilitates management, legal, and more

Codeless architecture doesn’t automatically deliver initiatives, but as you can see, it plays a major role in freeing up the resources necessary to ensure new initiatives can scale.

Are you curious about how the right ITSM solution can help you move your business forward? Join us on May 19, 2016 for a webinar all about the newest features in Cherwell Service Management. It's time to challenge your perception of IT Service Management.