Introduction: Why are stakeholders important?

Stakeholder feedback into Continuous Improvement Practice is the best and fastest way to transform Information Technology (IT) into a strategic asset for your company.

This article focuses on examining ITIL® Change Management stakeholders, who they are, the analysis of them, and why it is important, and the countless opportunities to gain insight into what to improve from stakeholder feedback.

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Are you frustrated about recurring Incidents? How much time do you spend fixing the same things over and over again? These are the Incidents users regularly contact the Service Desk about. If it bothers you, what do you think your users think about your IT organization? What is an inconvenience to you means lost productivity to users, and lost productivity equals lost revenue.

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Discover the meaning, principles & benefits of the Shift-Left support model approach & best-practice implementation strategies

IT departments have always lived in a world of balancing two opposing activities with limited resources:

1. Maintaining user productivity by responding when something breaks (an Incident) or a user request for services (a Service Request).
2. "Maximizing the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed and authorizing changes." ¹

What makes this juggling a challenge is the same high-level skills for planning, testing, and implementing changes are also the same resources required for resolving more complicated escalated incidents. Anyone that works in IT is familiar with firefighting interruptions. You are in your cube with your head around a time-sensitive change project when you receive a new incident that cannot wait. If you only had more people, then you could split the tasks between project management people and operational people. But is that really going to happen? So, what does happen is that you take the time to help out the users and skimp on the change project because projects are also time sensitive.

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For many organizations, the ITIL Change Management process can seem like a daunting task. It is easy to get caught up in all of the steps and lose sight of what is important. But by following some simple tips, you can foster an environment that cultivates a change management culture within your organization.

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Companies are increasingly embracing Software as a Service (SaaS), which, although originally designed for internal use by companies and departments, has quickly become an attractive option for B2C companies looking to provide their customer access to software from the cloud. SaaS is revolutionizing the business-to-customer call center industry by taking advantage of its ease of use and flexibility when compared with other options, like on-premises systems. Here are three main reasons your business to customer company should consider migrating your call center to a SaaS platform:

1. Ease of Use

   SaaS is a great way to make your customer support even more efficient and streamlined. You can manage everything from within one application, so you do not have to keep checking for new updates or conduct business with multiple vendors. A single portal for various applications distills customer service down to its simplest and most effective form.

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It is great to have IT change management systems and standards in place to support any changes your organization needs to implement. It is equally important to know when you should be initiating those processes to most effectively be agile and aid process-improvement practices.

IT administrators understand that their ITSM systems are complex, multi-faceted environments that require constant maintenance on time and on budget. To manage and retain the IT budgets available, they have to ensure data and processes are synchronized and reflected in a timely and cost-effective way. This level of management is essential to keeping IT operations on schedule and budgets kept under control. It can be challenging to transition from traditional to modernized/digital ITSM to ensure best practices are being followed so that you can adapt and maintain your business.

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IT help desks have some of the highest turnover, which is very costly, pushing 40%. Why is that? John Loyd suggests several reasons, including high stress, lack of experience, and feeling ineffective. And so, how can organizations and leaders go about maximizing IT help desk employee retention?

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The typical conception of the IT help desk is a group of support people ready to be contacted by employees with any number of types of problems, and the help desk staff willing and able to go about resolving these issues--a process that is "reactive" in nature.

But, what if those problems never even occurred? Or, what if they were mitigated before the customer even had them?

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Running a hospital presents a variety of unique challenges. It is like many other businesses as it requires effective leadership and communication to run smoothly, but the extra factor is the importance of timeliness. All businesses require quick employee response, but this could not be truer for a healthcare facility. Patients and their health can be unpredictable. There should be a method of reaching healthcare professionals promptly while still protecting the sensitive information being transmitted.

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