The Imperative for Digital Services
From the moment we wake up to the moment we go back to sleep, we swim in a sea of digital services. Like most people, my iPhone is the first thing I pick up and the last thing I put down every day. It is with me constantly and I use it nearly continuously—like billions of others. And like billions of others, I take it for granted.
A few weeks ago, I was taking my family to the beach. My son is in the backseat, playing Minecraft with his cousin. There is some heated (nonsensical) debate going on. Nothing unusual in any of this, except that my son is in a car cruising down the California coast and his cousin is sitting on a park bench in London. The level of technology services needed to enable two prepubescent kids to wail on each other with blocky weapons while seated on opposite sides of the world is pretty mind-boggling, and at the same time completely taken for granted. The availability of modern digital services takes the term pervasive to a whole new level, and this presents an excellent opportunity to evolve the existing IT service model to reflect the new digital reality of our lives.
For many years, IT was actually the driving force of technical innovation (even though they often reflexively resist the entry of shiny objects into their domain.) The IT ecosystem has always had to deal with a continuous series of seismic shifts, starting with the rise of the web and quickly followed by mobile, cloud, social, and now the Internet of Things. The protective wall around IT has essentially dissipated under the relentless pressure from the billions driving the consumerization of digital services.
The good news is that this process is forcing a tighter alignment between IT and the lines of business that serve both employees and customers. This is hugely important to IT; expanding from a traditional role of core infrastructure support to becoming an enabler of digital service innovation through the delivery of always-on mobile, cloud, and social-based services, pulls IT into a more strategic framework. Digital services are a competitive differentiator, they have a direct impact on customer satisfaction, and they become the defining context for the overall customer experience across all facets of the organization.
What an end user experiences is the result of the integration of a myriad of systems and processes (e.g. one click on Amazon touches sales, customer support, operations and logistics, shipping, finance, etc.) Every group is updated instantly and all of it coalesces into an experience that the end user barely notices because everything is working the way it’s supposed to. The digital experience that IT delivers touches every facet of a business; all of it is now quantifiable and therefore subject to optimization.
The true core of Digital Service Management is an elegant and compelling experience for the end user, whether it’s a consumer ordering products or an IT service technician answering a help desk query. This is the area where we have been laser-focused; the potential implied in Digital Service Management has fundamentally shifted the tone and direction of our product roadmap and all associated deliverables. It aligns precisely to where our customers are headed, we are actively creating an advocacy framework, and we are delighting our end users. This is the future, not just for BMC, but for the entire IT Service Management ecosystem.