When a company’s main focus is outsourced payroll, HR administration, and accounting, it’s inevitable that employees will work with multiple software systems, such as a time attendance system, payroll software, and various ERP systems.
These systems must be maintained, and it is essential to respond promptly and appropriately to user IT questions or access issues to ensure the continuity and quality of the service. This is where the importance of a centralized and unified IT service management (ITSM) system comes in – as was the case at BPiON.
The introduction of such a system isn’t particularly groundbreaking; a multi-country consulting service company should have one if it wants to provide excellent internal IT support service. However, it highlights several very obvious challenges that every growing business, working with multiple software and databases, must handle as it expands.
Implementing an intelligent, centralized ticketing system not only optimizes processes and makes employees’ work easier, but also supports further expansion. In a well-designed, company-specific system, you can manage not only employees’ access issues and IT incidents but also extend this to customers’ IT troubleshooting. Both the employee portals and client portals provide visibility into ongoing tickets, to whom the task is addressed for resolution, and what is their current status.
Before we implemented a unified system for our internal IT & technology support processes, we had to face a few challenges that nearly every expanding company in the outsourced payroll, HR, tax, and accounting sectors encounters.
Untraceable requests, hard-to-assemble reports – and their completeness
The first and most obvious problem for our IT colleagues was that all requests, inquiries, and error messages were sent via email. This made the support process untraceable and difficult to report on effectively. This meant that incoming issues were hard to categorize, solution processes were difficult to track and monitor, and the performance of colleagues in support positions couldn’t be measured accurately.
An IT service management system primarily ensures traceability, transparency, and the measurability of service quality. It enables internal collaboration on issues, such as communication-related to tasks, delegating tickets, or automating the delegation and prioritization of tasks among team members for a given issue group. By creating defined support teams, issues within a specific topic are handled by the appropriate groups and their leaders, significantly speeding up issue resolution. Employees can check the status of their cases by logging into their portal to see who is working on the issue resolution and what its current status is.
A more advanced and robust IT service management system, beyond simple case management, can easily generate reports & analytics for the CTO. For example:
- Which application receives the most requests or error messages?
- What types of incidents are most common (e.g., what are the most frequent inquiries for a newly introduced software)?
- How long does it take to resolve a specific issue?
- What areas require additional training for employees?
- How many issues were resolved by support team members in a given period?
- Who is the fastest at responding to IT incidents?
- On average, what is the average ticket resolution time?
Data-driven decision-making is invaluable in workflow optimization and the objective evaluation of employee performance. Ultimately, when we can measure something, report on the results, and strive for continuous improvement, it leads to greater satisfaction for the users on the other side (in this case, our employees and clients).
IT support is not just about providing a system solution and saying “use it.” The IT manager has visibility over all essential data and recurring patterns, enabling employees to collaborate in the most seamless and efficient way.
Why are approvals important in such a system?
The software can handle predefined workflows with the appropriate approval steps. We ensure control to eliminate the possibility of errors, but this is also a fundamental expectation as an ISO 27001-certified service provider, which requires compliance with the highest data security standards. If your company handles sensitive data such as payroll or tax information, you must adopt criteria that prioritize the security of these data.
The new system and the underlying operational processes are ISO27001 compliant, meaning we meet various data security requirements, such as MFA, approval processes, and role-based access control to data visibility. This essentially means that everyone can only access the data they need.
Long-term opportunities of a centralized IT service management system
Once the system is integrated into your own processes and software, you can take the next step and extend it to your clients.
In our case, this is particularly important because we integrate multiple online tools for our clients, making it much easier to manage individual IT problems and support processes within one software framework. We wanted a system through which we could also handle client IT and technology-related issues
In summary, a centralized ITSM (IT service management system) helps streamline internal IT support processes, enabling IT leaders to gain visibility into operations, identify patterns, and make leadership decisions based on collected data.
