What are the benefits of Shift Left for ITSM?

The benefits of Shift Left for your ITSM are great; it's more than just a catchphrase. It’s a way for IT departments to understand their customers better, empower them to resolve their own issues, and win back time for more rewarding work. And with IT teams now being challenged to align their services with increasing customer expectations, there’s no better time to start shifting left.

For IT service desks, shifting left is about sharing your service desk’s knowledge within your organization, bringing it closer to the customer. The basic idea behind shift left is simple: skilled IT professionals make their knowledge available to less experienced front office colleagues, helping them to answer more complex questions from customers.

Here are the five key benefits of shift left for IT service management.

1. Building stronger relationships with IT customers

A definite by-product of being closer to your customer is a steady increase in personal interactions with the rest of the business. Customers will enjoy the way IT shares knowledge. They’ll appreciate your approachable attitude. As an extension, they will also feel more connected with the IT department and more likely to engage with them, which promotes further conversation.

2. Empowering IT users to solve their own issues

Bringing solutions closer to the customer restores balance to the force. Till now, the scales have arguably been tipped out of IT’s favour. Customers use traditional ticket logging technologies to throw any issue at IT. Enabling customers to solve their own problems with a self-service portal decreases IT workload. It allows the customers to be the heroes in their own story. And they won’t have to wait in line for you to fix minor problems.

3. More time for more rewarding work

It doesn’t always have to be about the customer, right? At the end of the day, the quality of your IT services highly depends on the attitude and motivation of the people delivering it.

The idea of shift left is that you share knowledge. To let each line of support, including the customer, solve more challenging issues than they did before. If you outsource your simplest tasks, you have more time for work that’ll help you deliver real value on an organizational level.

4. IT knowledge is shared across the whole business

Shift left is driven by a concept called Knowledge Centered Service (KCS), which is a simple but effective IT support methodology that places the creation and sharing of knowledge at the heart of every IT interaction. Knowledge simply becomes power. The systems used to capture, catalogue and share that power become IT’s most significant offering throughout the whole journey towards shifting left. Take it from us; TOPdesk’s internal service desk teams have implemented the KCS guidance into their own support functions and the positive results on both sides of the service relationship are very encouraging.

Knowledge becomes power. The systems used to capture, catalogue, and share that power become IT’s most significant offering throughout the whole journey towards shifting left.

5. Your IT team get the recognition they deserve

It’s always a good idea to make sure your IT department has proper visibility. CIOs and IT Directors will benefit, since they want positive IT stories to float their way up to the board. Not only does it reflect well on the work of the department, but it gives them far more leverage with negotiating for things such as more funding or adding more people to your team.

Use your IT team’s knowledge for good

Check out our Knowledge Management e-book to discover the benefits of Knowledge Centered Service and how to help your IT department get there, including:

• How to lower lead and resolution times using Knowledge Centered Service (KCS)
• Why you should invest in knowledge management
• How much time you will save – including a calculator
• A step-by-step guide to implementing KCS