Which way are you going?

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a meeting for the San Francisco chapter of HDI. For those who are not familiar, HDI is a membership association that connects professionals at all levels in the service management industry. It provides them the opportunity to collaborate to improve their customer experience, make their business more productive and build a foundation for a successful career.

At this particular event there was a guest speaker and the topic was the “Shift-Left” strategy. To be quite honest, this was the first time I had heard of that and I can tell this was a first for others in the room as well. The topic was very interesting and shed some light on the ITSM industry. Being that it was new to so many other people and myself I thought I should share some facts about what is and the benefits.

The concept of “shift-left” is pretty simple and has been around for years but is relatively new to the service management field. It involves process of moving issue resolution to the front line or as close to the customer as possible. Adoption of this strategy is being driven by a greater need to meet customer expectations and business requirements.

There are a couple immediate benefits that the “Shift-Left” strategy provides. The first and most important for many organizations is cost reduction. If your users can resolve issues on their own or at a lower level of support then you can save your organization a significant amount of money. Let’s say it costs $10 to resolve an incident at level 1, $100 at level 2 and $300 at level 3. Wouldn’t you want them to resolve it sooner than later? What’s even better is that enabling users to help themselves can result in issues being resolved before they even reach support. The use of knowledge bases or similar sources can help further enhance this. In addition to saving money this also saves time which is the next benefit. Directing users to solve issues and problems on their own allows your organization to reduce downtime, speed up issue resolution times and rely less of IT staff. I haven’t met anyone yet in IT who says they have too much time or too much money.

Overall, if this strategy is right for your organization I’d say to give it a try. There are lots of resources out there like HDI to help develop your strategy. And of course Cireson has tools like the Self-Service Portal and Knowledge Base apps to enhance SCSM to make things run seamlessly.