UEM and ITSM are separate specialties within many enterprises and IT teams. However, there is one critical link that connects these two important disciplines: users. Herewith, some thoughts on that connection and what it means to your ITSM and UEM efforts. 

ITSM: It’s All About the Users (Almost)

In 2016, Ivanti Senior Product Marketing Manager Melanie Karunaratne summarized the results of conversations with numerous IT and ITSM teams in a great blog post—“5 Things You’re Doing Wrong with ITSM.” The first two issues cited in that summary? Ignoring users’ service needs, and providing poor user experiences.

Users are the consumers of the services IT and ITSM teams deliver and manage. User perception of and satisfaction with those services is therefore, by some lights at least, ultimate determinants of the business value and effectiveness of every ITSM initiative. Whether users perceive their productivity is enhanced or hampered by how IT services are delivered and managed can directly affect whether business leaders view their investments in IT, including ITSM, as worthwhile. Whatever the reasons for those user perceptions.

What Shapes Users’ Views of ITSM

How do your enterprise’s IT services compare with those offered by, say, Amazon.com, eBay, or Google? Because most of your users have experience with one or more of these popular online services. And for better or worse, fairly or unfairly, those users are constantly comparing their online experiences outside of work with the services they use at work every day. Few if any enterprise IT services or applications fare well in such comparisons.

There are many, many reasons for the “satisfaction gap” separating users’ at-work and at-home online experiences. Enterprise IT and ITSM teams are saddled with multiple constraints that don’t apply or apply differently to their counterparts at leading online services. Among these are the need to support shifting mixes of old, older, and newer technologies, budgetary challenges and fluctuations, and constantly changing user and business requirements. These and other constraints contribute to one of the other common ITSM faults Melanie called out in her post—a lack of agility to support business change.

Users’ Choices Create IT Challenges

An example of this lack of agility is highlighted in the recent Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) study, “Unified Endpoint Management: Simplifying the Security and Support of PC and Mobile Devices.” EMA surveyed more than 100 IT directors for the study. Based on the results of that survey, EMA found that “the average business professional regularly employs at least two computing devices—including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—to perform job tasks. Moreover, roughly half of all workers utilize both a PC and a mobile device in the course of a typical day at the office.” 

What does this mean to IT and ITSM managers? “According to surveyed IT managers, the need to support multi-device architectures ranks among the top three challenges in supporting user productivity. Further, the other two leading challenges (ensuring data security and reducing IT management costs) are directly related to multi-device support requirements,” EMA found.

Typically, users adopt a combination of devices in an attempt to be more productive. IT and ITSM teams, meanwhile, must often try to support those choices with aging, separate, largely incompatible management tools, for those users’ chosen devices and for the services delivered to those users.

Modernize ITSM—Starting with UEM

To address these challenges effectively, most if not all enterprises must modernize the tools and processes they use to deliver and manage IT services. Given the critical roles users play in how those services are delivered, consumed, and perceived, it only makes sense that efforts to modernize and improve ITSM must incorporate significant attention to UEM. ITSM teams (and UEM and/or user experience managers where they exist) should start by finding ways to consolidate and improve management of user devices and profiles. Starting the journey toward more modern and effective ITSM by focusing on UEM can mean rapid and significant improvements in overall IT management, and the perceptions of users and business leaders.

Succeed at UEM and ITSM with Ivanti

Ivanti has solutions that can help you and your team to modernize and improve both UEM and ITSM at your enterprise. Integrate management of users’ mobile devices, and of Apple macOS and iOS devices. Improve IT service delivery. Manage IT services from the cloud. Ivanti can also help you to manage user profiles and policies more directly and granularly, and to automate, ease, and speed multiple UEM and ITSM tasks and processes. (Tip: doing both will help you to avoid the other two ITSM “wrongs” Melanie identified in her blog post.)  

To learn more about the challenges to UEM presented by today’s multi-device, multi-platform world, download and read the EMA report. Then, contact Ivanti, and let us help you to achieve and sustain success with both UEM and ITSM.

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