What is ITxM and Why You Must be Aware of IT

Quick question. What does ITxM mean to you? You may have come across this term in combination with framework and procedures and processes, which immediately leads to a disconnect. This disconnection is what will be your downfall. Expanded, ITxM means IT Experience Management. Now the term may start to make more sense.

In the context of enterprise IT network environments, it’s all about improving an organization’s capabilities within the areas of IT asset, IT service, and IT security management systematically. And toss in IT identity management as well.

With most businesses reliant on technology for optimal business operations and customer outcomes, there’s undoubtedly a need for assurances that business-as-usual (BAU) IT operations are fit for 2022 and beyond. Asset, service, security, and identity management encompass overlapping IT initiatives. Unifying IT includes discovering where these roads meet and charting the steps to boost efficiencies and reduce duplicate efforts. Unifying IT isn’t about getting two or more departments to work together more collaboratively. It’s about leveraging practices and tools to track asset lifecycles, improve service levels, manage identities and levels of access, and safeguard your IT investments and sensitive information.

In many ways, it’s a continuing jigsaw of IT-related improvements that’s both been brought into greater focus and accelerated by the global pandemic – with the productivity of employees and business operations at risk through potentially outdated IT practices. Importantly, some of these are challenges and opportunities that are worthy of a savvy leader’s attention and, where necessary, the refocusing of corporate budgets on the initiatives that will make the biggest impact on business operations and outcomes.

Hopefully, the challenges of the last 18-24 months proved the worth and ingenuity of IT teams around the globe. Especially in ensuring that employees can be productive while staying safe. In 2022, this focus on employee productivity needs to continue – such that, in addition to meeting board-level concerns related to cybersecurity, in particular, IT leaders should focus on two key opportunities to ensure that employee productivity is optimized.

The first of these opportunities – digital transformation – is now over a decade old, with the use of technology to enhance the traditional and likely ineffective, manually-intensive business processes already accelerated thanks to the remote-working needs of the pandemic. Importantly, digital transformation is an ongoing need and not a one-off project with a finite end date.

However, while much of what’s needed in terms of operational digital transformation can be brought about by what IT might call “enterprise service management” – the sharing of IT service management (ITSM) capabilities to improve the operations, services, experiences, and outcomes of other business functions – there’s potentially an overlooked issue. This is the disconnect between the performance-based views of the IT provider and the employees they support.

It’s why the interest in, and adoption of, IT experience management (ITXM™) capabilities have grown rapidly in recent years – with the disconnect between supply-side and demand-side views of IT performance causing operational and productivity-related issues. Not only in the status quo but looking forward too. For example, in situations where IT-related improvements improve IT’s efficiency but to the detriment of employee and business productivity. This is the second opportunity – and one that needs to be firmly grasped to ensure that the investments in the first add the value that’s expected.

It’s important to appreciate that the aforementioned disconnect isn’t just a legacy issue, it’s also something that can be amplified going forward. Where, while digital transformation initiatives will continue to deliver greater opportunities for organizations to exploit technology and data, there’s also a need to ensure that the right improvements are being made in the right places (and that suboptimal decisions aren’t being made about the technology-based changes to the status quo).

To help, our early IT assessment services that looks at IT experience across the board assist organizations of all sizes – in both starting and succeeding with their experience management journey.