Service Desk Integration – extending boundaries adds business value

This guide to ITSM integration aims to highlight the opportunities and benefits related to integration of the service desk across the enterprise, with collaboration, reporting and project technologies and of the overall digital transformation picture.

Integration applies in many forms across the organisation, where IT systems and services and the service desk and ITSM software are commonly at the core.
So much has changed for the organisation recently, not least in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, and widening the reach of technology has required and demonstrated the flexibility of a more open mindset with tools available to match. ITSM integration can apply within and across the organisation and has done for years already, with what is often termed ‘Enterprise Service Management’ taking the core elements and value of IT service desk process and functions and applying those to other service suppliers within the business – HR, finance, facilities departments and so on, to the benefit of wider teams and end-users.
Wider integration with third party technologies is becoming more of a possibility all of the time with modern APIs doing the heavy lifting of keeping interfaces current. With reliance on other applications like Microsoft Teams on the increase. integrating the service desk hub so that it automatically updates users via Teams on issues and their resolution is more and more important. Likewise, for organisations using other technical project tools like Jira, these teams often work closely with the IT organisation and keeping each other up to speed on issues with automatic updates synchronised can be hugely beneficial.
Another area commonly seeing a value-add from integration is reporting. Analytics tools like Power BI can be integrated to take the data from ITSM software and add value beyond the ITSM reporting dashboard with specialist interpretation of results and even suggestions on reasons and improvements. Of course, the ITSM software should offer day to day users a way to set up their own reports for KPIs etc – this acts over and above to help the wider business.

Read on to discover the benefits of ITSM integration and more.