When it comes to deciding on a new IT Service Management solution for your organization, there’s a wide array of products to choose from. Whilst certain considerations such as size, budget and specific organizational needs will be different from one company to the next, there are some essential criteria areas that will be common among most during the ITSM tool selection process. Here, we examine the eight key elements that should to be considered during the decision making process.
1) Out of the box readiness
It’s obvious that choosing a tool that most suits your needs straight out of the box will always be more convenient to get set up and functioning compared to a tool that requires lots of early stage configuration. What is often less obvious during this stage of the selection process is checking to see if the product will require any additional software packages in order to operate as required and also deliver any specific requirements that the organization has. As well as this, considerations should be given and even tested as to the specific platforms the new product will support such as Windows operating systems, browser editions and mobile compatibilities.
2) Customization and flexibility
Many tools allow the flexibility to easily customize components of the product such as forms, fields, reports, workflows and permissions. The ability to customize these items is often a very important deciding factor when choosing a new ITSM product. Not having the ability to customize such areas of the product prevents you from being able to tailor the product to your organization’s needs now and in the future. Even if the product does allow for customization, consideration should be given as to how easily these changes can be made. Will it require a third party consultant or can the customizations be carried out by internal IT resource. Similarly, it’s important to check if future software updates will have any effect on both the customizations that have been made and on any third party integrations that work with the product such as remote desktop platforms.
3) On premise or hosted
For many organizations choosing a product that has the option of being hosted or being available via the cloud makes sense. Typically a hosted product requires little or no maintenance, has no additional cost in terms of hardware and can easily be accessed from anywhere using most web browsers. However, many organizations still prefer to keep such products hosted locally so that they can easily and securely access to the information that’s contained in its databases. The other advantage of having the data readily available is in a scenario of having to migrate the information to a different product at a later stage. As the data is hosted in your environment, it’s often easier to extract and move to a new database than it would be if the data resides in the cloud.
4) Ongoing technical support and maintenance
When choosing any new software product for your organization you want to know that the vendor you are purchasing from is going to be able to provide you with the ongoing support and product maintenance you require. With this in mind, it’s important to take a look at who the vendor is and how they provide support. Taking a look at how many years the company has been in business and if they have been through any recent acquisitions can be a good indication if they will still be operating in 5 years’ time. Likewise, how does the vendor provide support for the product? Is it in-house technicians or is outsourced to a third party who might have less knowledge of the product?
5) API integrations
Regardless of what tool is right for your environment, the likelihood is that you will have a need for other third party applications that work in conjunction with the chosen product. These might be applications for custom web forms, remote helpdesk software or integrations to other databases. In order to make sure that the information is shared between these products you will need to check if your newly chosen ITSM vendor provides access to the products API for the purposes of integration.
6) Additional costs
When reviewing a product’s functionality, it’s important to examine what features might not be included in the cost of the standard product platform. Many products offer features such as mobile applications, remote helpdesk tools and modules for incident and change management. However, quite often many of these items are not included in the cost of the standard product offering and are considered additional add on items that are charged for separately.
7) Interface and mobile platform capabilities
When implementing new software tools it can often be difficult to get end users on board with using the new product. Choosing a tool that has a friendly user interface will assist in encouraging the users to adopt using the new product. Items such as what browsers the product supports, can the configurations and forms be easily customizable, and is there an easy to use end-user self-service portal are all areas that should be considered during the evaluation stage of the choosing a new ITSM tool.
8) Total cost of ownership
Determining the total cost of ownership of your new ITSM product should be calculated based on a minimum of a 5 year period. Often a cloud or SaaS product will appear to be the more cost effective option when compared to an on premise hosted solution. However, when compared over a 5 year period the cost can often be similar or sometimes less. With that said, even with an on premise solution, there are additional overheads that need to be taken into consideration such as the hardware and software costs to host the product and how frequently these items will need to be upgraded. Other areas of additional cost that should be examined are the ongoing costs associated with training additional licensing and upgrades.
BOSS Solutions is a U.S. Company providing innovative software solutions to meet the need of customers in service management. The company’s major product lines are BOSSDesk that provides IT Service Management on the Cloud, BOSS Support Central – that provides IT Service Management On-Premise, and BOSS811 a one call ticket management solution for the damage prevention industry.
Author
Michael Curran
Marketing Director