As an IT professional working hard to deliver the IT services and support capabilities your organization needs, it’s hard not to see and hear all the interest in the importance of IT experience management (ITXM) to IT service management. Where even though ITSM best practices have brought corporate IT organizations from technology domain management to the management of services (and the importance of value in ITIL 4), ITXM is taking IT organizations beyond the reporting of service level agreement (SLA) target achievement to better understand the impact of IT services on employee experiences and their productivity.
The change is there to be had. However, it requires senior leadership backing (and potentially funding, at least in the short term). As an IT professional, you would not be alone in struggling to get senior business leadership – such as your CIO, CFO, and other C-level executives – to support your planned ITXM initiative.
To help, this blog explains how you can get your senior leaders to buy into ITXM, especially traversing the need to demonstrate measurable business impact and not just IT-centric improvements.
Start by ensuring that senior leadership priorities are understood
When laying the foundations to sell ITXM, it’s important to appreciate the “end game.” While improving your IT organization’s operations and outcomes is a noble pursuit, your senior business leaders will want to understand how ITXM will help them meet their business objectives. So, remember that any articulation of ITXM’s aims and benefits needs to place the business priorities first and IT priorities second.
Hence, it’s essential to understand how your senior leaders prioritize business outcomes, including customer and revenue growth, technology-enabled innovation, increased operational efficiency, better risk mitigation, and improved employee productivity such that the opportunities of ITXM for your organization are framed in terms of its business impact, not just IT-centric benefits.
Plan to receive pushback
Especially in today’s business climate, your senior business leaders will have concerns about IT investments. While cost is important, value (or business value) is even more so. So, plan for and have answers to questions focused on the cost vs. value of ITXM. Expect to be asked, “How will ITXM deliver measurable business outcome improvements?” and have an answer that makes ITXM seem an unmissable opportunity for IT to better deliver against your business’ technology-enablement needs.
However, not all of the pushback will be cost or value-related. Expect to be questioned about how ITXM-related changes will disrupt existing workflows (even if this improves them). Senior leaders will also be concerned about ITXM’s strategic fit, so be prepared to successfully articulate how ITXM aligns with your organization’s digital transformation initiatives that likely focus on artificial intelligence (AI) right now.
Be specific by focusing on “the key metrics that matter” to your senior leaders. For example, your CIO might want to see how ITXM “moves the dial” of their system reliability, IT efficiency, and digital transformation success metrics. Or your CFO might want to know how ITXM will bring cost reductions, improve IT’s project-based return on investment (ROI), and budget optimization opportunities.
Build a robust and compelling business case for ITXM
While this might seem a “no brainer,” you’ll be lucky if ITXM sells itself to your senior business leadership, i.e. ITXM adoption without a robust business case.
Your ITXM business case should be aligned with what was shared above. This is commonly articulated from two key perspectives:
- The cost of poor IT experiences. For example, the impact of particular IT-caused business pain points such as employee lost productivity related to IT issues and inefficiencies.
- The ROI of ITXM. For example, higher employee productivity can be achieved by minimizing tech-related downtime. Including ITXM quick wins that offer a rapid ROI will help here.
A key “believability” factor in this is using real-world data and benchmarks. We can help here – including our aggregated industry benchmarks and case studies on what individual customers have achieved. For example, Ahlstrom achieved a 150% increase in employee Happiness and a 57% reduction in employee lost time with IT incidents thanks to ITXM.
You can read more on creating your ITXM business case here.
Design your ITXM pitch to “press the right senior leadership buttons”
In the same way people buy people, not products, something similar happens with business investments. Your selling of the opportunity of ITXM via a presentation or pitch might do more than the contents of your business case (assuming the business case “stands up”).
You can increase your probability of winning over senior leaders during your pitch by:
- Staying focused on decision-maker priorities. This might require a balance across different senior business stakeholders and leveraging the aforementioned metrics. For example, “Employees on average lose X hours per week due to IT issues – ITXM cut this by Y%, increasing their productivity by Z%.”
- Using business terms instead of technical jargon. For example, simple IT terminology changes such as using “IT help desk” rather than “IT service desk” or “problems” rather than “incidents” might ignore “what ITIL says,” but it will make it easier for non-IT personnel to understand.
- Leveraging storytelling rather than simply sharing what ITXM does. For example, call existing business pain points that ITXM will address rather than articulating what might seem like yet another IT project.
You’ll also need that pushback preparation ready. For example, a potential senior leader objection that ITXM is an additional IT cost can be positioned as it being a cost-optimization tool.
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