Elevate Your Service Capabilities to Drive Enterprise Value
Build a roadmap to shift from IT-centric to enterprise service management practices and drive toward an Exponential IT future.
If IT services don’t extend beyond internal operations to customers – especially with exponential technologies like generative AI changing expectations – organizations will fall behind. IT must elevate digital experiences seamlessly to drive organizational growth. Use our blueprint to systematically take IT service management (ITSM) from being perceived as an operational supporter to an enterprise value enabler.
Digital and technology-first services have become the primary means of customer engagement driving organizational growth and revenue. As a result, exceptional service has become the key differentiator for organizations. Technology leaders must shift focus from IT services to enterprise services to remain relevant and to support evolving customer expectations.
1. Put value delivery at the heart of services.
Let go of traditional notions of what a service is and adopt the notion that services exist to deliver value to customers. Those who succeed in elevating their service strategy from "back" to "front" office with customer experience and value at the center will be well positioned as true organizational leaders.
2. Incremental improvements are no longer enough.
Exponential technologies have ushered in a new era, and you should reimagine service delivery accordingly. It’s not enough to focus on improving existing IT services for internal customers. Instead, start asking where the organization needs to be in the future to drive organizational value, then design services for that future vision and your end customers. This requires more than just improving a single service or capability; it requires a comprehensive strategy that elevates all service-related capabilities toward the same goal.
3. Without being end-to-end, you're leaking value.
Newer technologies such as AI have resulted in heightened customer expectations from service delivery. IT is uniquely positioned to view services across the organization and must capitalize on it to orchestrate and deliver seamless experiences and enterprise services that drive results every step of the way.
Transform IT service management into a value-creating powerhouse using our framework
This research will help you define the IT service vision for the future, identify actions and AI use cases to elevate key service capabilities, and build a roadmap to tie it all together. Use it to have a measured plan that balances near-term quick-wins and foundational components with a big-picture, art-of-the-possible, future-state vision.
- Build and maintain a service strategy roadmap that is aligned with your goals and bridges the current and target state across nine service capabilities.
- Explore use cases for AI in service management that can accelerate your roadmap initiatives.
- Bring executives on board by building communication that leaves a lasting impression of the value IT can create for the organization and its customers.
Elevate Your Service Capabilities to Drive Enterprise Value
Build a roadmap to shift from IT-centric to enterprise service management practices and drive toward an Exponential IT future.
Introduction: What is Exponential IT?
- The technology curve has recently bent exponentially.
- Generative AI has been the catalyst for this sudden shift, but there are more and more new technologies emerging (e.g. quantum computing, 5G), putting significant pressure on all organizations.
- All IT leaders and organizations are at risk of falling behind if they do not adopt new technologies fast enough.
- Exponential IT is a framework defined by Info-Tech Research Group to instruct IT leaders across all IT domains on how to transform their organization and elevate their value creation capabilities to close the gap between the exponential progression of technological change and the linear progression of IT’s ability to successfully manage that change.
- This blueprint provides guidance on developing an Exponential IT roadmap tailored to the value outcomes that you wish to pursue in the era of disruptive emerging technologies.
Your Exponential IT Journey
To keep pace with the exponential technology curve, adopt an Exponential IT mindset and practices. Assess your organization’s readiness and embark on a transformation journey. This blueprint will help you build your roadmap to get there.
To access all Exponential IT research, visit the Exponential IT Research Center - Go to this link
Adopt an Exponential IT Mindset
Info-Tech resources: Exponential IT Research Center, Research Center Overview, and Keynote
Explore the Art of the Possible
Info-Tech resources: Exponential IT research blueprints for nine IT domains
Gauge Your Organizational Readiness
Info-Tech resource: Exponential IT Readiness Diagnostic
Build an Exponential IT Roadmap
Info-Tech resource: Develop an Exponential IT Roadmap blueprint
Embark on Your Exponential IT Journey
Info-Tech resources: Ongoing and tactical domain-level research and insights
Elevate Your Service Capabilities to Drive Enterprise Value
Build a roadmap to shift from IT-centric to enterprise service management practices and drive toward an Exponential IT future.
EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Analyst perspective
Design a holistic approach to service experience and operations.
“Over the next decade, digital and technology-first services will be how customers and communities primarily engage with your offerings – be that your products, platforms, experiences, support, or any other outcome. Exceptional service then becomes the key differentiator for organizations, prompting technology leaders to shift focus from “IT services” to “enterprise services.” In turn, these tech-driven services will bring immense value to customers and your organization.
Delivering exceptional tech-based services requires a complete overhaul, placing the customer at the center of design, orchestration, and delivery. This transformation demands merging enterprise and business architecture, customer experience, and service planning practices as the foundation for enterprise value.
Given this, we believe that a digital service management and orchestration strategy will be a critical extension of digital transformation and enterprise strategy. This must go beyond design, embracing exceptional service operations. By doing so, organizations not only enhance agility and cost efficiency but also become the linchpin for achieving crucial organizational goals.”
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Carlene McCubbin
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Executive summary
Your Challenge
Exponential technologies such as generative AI are changing organizations and industries at a rapid pace and bringing unprecedented opportunities and risks for IT.
Traditional IT service delivery models aren’t supporting the fast-growing needs of organizations and departments to modernize and stay competitive.
IT leaders need to transform the way they plan, design, and deliver services to support organizational growth and transformation, but the traditional mindset and focus on IT service management is hindering agility, innovation, and the ability to support dynamic business requirements.
IT will get left out of critical processes and decision-making if it can’t accelerate to meet demand.
Common Obstacles
IT organizations take a technology-first approach because they:
- Excel in operational tasks so have difficulty focusing on strategic initiatives.
- Exist within an organizational culture that lacks a customer-centric mindset.
- Have been traditionally discouraged from engaging “external” enterprise customers.
Ultimately, the IT organization cannot mature or offer services that provide real business value if they continue employing a technology-first approach.
Info-Tech’s Approach
Evolve and elevate your service strategy to focus on customer value delivery. This blueprint will help you:
- Shift your mindset from a traditional IT-centric focus to an enterprise view of services with customer experience and value at the forefront.
- Create a future-oriented vision for your service strategy and practices.
- Set achievable targets to elevate each service capability and determine actions to reach those targets, including potential use cases for AI.
- Identify and prioritize initiatives and develop a roadmap to work toward your vision.
Info-Tech Insight
Services are the lifeblood of the organization, with digital and technology-first services set to become the primary means of customer engagement driving organizational growth and revenue in the coming years. Exceptional service then becomes the key differentiator for organizations, meaning technology leaders must shift focus from “IT services” to “enterprise services,” with value delivery at the center of every decision beginning with service planning. Those who succeed in elevating their service strategy from “back” to “front” office with customer experience at the center will be well positioned as true organizational leaders.
Glossary of key terms
Customer
Someone who uses your services.
Business Customer: Internal organization customers: HR, Finance, Marketing, Legal, etc.
Enterprise Customer: External organization customers: students, shoppers, constituents, etc.
Service
All the activities, apps, processes, data, resources, and technology assembled into coherent, ready-to-use packages and delivered to individuals or businesses to address a need or enable them to do something.
Services deliver something of value to customers, often in real time and through many different customer touchpoints and interactions.
In this way, the close connection between the organization and the customer forms the customer experience.
Enterprise, Business, and Digital Services
Enterprise Services: Services the organization’s customers consume, e.g. student registration services.
Business Services: Services the business (internal departments) consume, e.g. HR, Finance, or Legal.
Digital Services: Services that use digital technologies, e.g. online taxes, online student registration, or online shopping. Digital services often bring IT closer to the enterprise customer.
Service Management
An organizational capability that contains the operating model, practices, and functions as a system to deliver business value in the form of IT services. This includes service governance, portfolio management, design, orchestration, integration, and other capabilities beyond just operations management.
Enterprise service management (ESM) extends this concept to all services across the enterprise, not just IT services.
Value
What a service provides to a customer.
A customer does not care about the effort it takes you to deliver the services, only about the value of the service to them.
Services are distinct from products mainly in how organizations and customers create value together (often in real time) to form a customer experience.
Capability
A capability represents an organizational ability or capacity to deliver on specific needs or achieve specific business outcomes.
Capabilities are focused on the entire system that would be in place to satisfy a particular need. This includes the people who are competent to complete a specific task and the technology, processes, and resources to deliver the task.
The pace of technology change will continue to increase exponentially
IT must solve the problem of rapidly and exponentially increasing expectations.
In a rapidly changing technology landscape, organizations are adopting exponential technologies at an accelerated rate. Traditional linear IT is no longer viable to sustain IT’s place as the leading technology provider for its organization.
The chasm between the organization’s desire for harnessing technology and IT’s ability to deliver it will continue to widen.
Challenges with traditional linear IT:
- Slow to adapt to more modern service delivery models
- Processes and decision-making that can’t accelerate to meet customer demand
- Transactional arm’s-length relationships with organization units and vendors
- Insufficient funding and focus on innovation
- Locked into a siloed and hierarchical operating model
IT needs to continue to support and enable its organization. However, to proactively keep this gap closed, IT needs to fundamentally transform the way it is operating while maximizing opportunities and minimizing risks posed by emerging technologies.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
You get:
- Elevate Your Service Capabilities to Drive Enterprise Value Deck
- Exponential IT Service Strategy Workbook
- AI for ITSM Use Case Analysis Workbook
- Service Strategy Roadmap Executive Communication Template
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 8 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Discover Exponential IT
- Call 1: Introduce the Exponential IT concept and predictions for the future of ITSM. Establish scope, methodology, and deliverables. Align on key terminology. Discuss Exponential IT Diagnostic (optional).
Guided Implementation 2: Define Your Guiding Star
- Call 1: Discuss challenges and risks. Craft vision statement and guiding principles.
- Call 2: Discuss the meaning of value in your organization. Understand Exponential IT value outcomes. Define and document goals aligned with value. Identify metrics to track each goal.
Guided Implementation 3: Assess Technology and Capability Readiness
- Call 1: Review key milestones for each service capability. Identify current and target milestone for each capability.
- Call 2: Review and discuss AI use cases in ITSM. Identify use cases you wish to pursue.
- Call 3: Brainstorm actions to fill the gaps for each capability or use case. Compile initial initiative list.
Guided Implementation 4: Build Your Roadmap
- Call 1: Prioritize initiatives to build initial roadmap. Finalize prioritization to complete list of initiatives.
- Call 2: Finalize roadmap. Discuss communication plan and finalize executive communication template.
Develop a Plan to Pilot Enterprise Service Management
Create a Service Management Roadmap
Elevate Your Service Capabilities to Drive Enterprise Value
Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog
Create an IT View of the Service Catalog
Initiate Your Service Management Program
Develop Meaningful Service Metrics
IT Service Management Selection Guide
Service Management Integration With Agile Practices
Define Your Enterprise IT and Digital Services
