This week we’re returning to our spotlight on NYU IT Departments and their FY23 projects and initiatives by featuring the Global Service Management and User Success (GSM-US) team. Led by Associate Vice President Michael Warden, GSM-US focuses on delivering excellent, consistent, and cost-effective service to the NYU community. The GSM-US team drives continuous service improvement by actively seeking and acting on user feedback, managing rollouts of new services and service changes, and supporting service partners in service design and delivery.
GSM-US is in the process of establishing a strategic roadmap, and I’d like to highlight one effort that they’ll be working on with stakeholders across our IT community in the next few months: assessing our maturity in ITIL and IT Service Management (ITSM) and laying the foundation for improvement across all of our teams.
We are lucky to have within our field a framework of best practices for “how we work,” in the form of ITIL and ITSM, and fortunate to have a platform like ServiceLink (ServiceNow) that has brought all of the processes together into a tool where we can manage different elements of our work in one location. The ServiceLink team is working on a project called zBoot to upgrade the platform and as part of that work they will be resetting many of the ITSM capabilities back to baseline or “vanilla.” This will enable us to align with industry best practices and take advantage of the improved capabilities of the platform, including Chat, Virtual Agent, Major Incident Management, Agent Workspace, and more.
In parallel with this effort, GSM-US has kicked off a process that uses a maturity model to assess the current state of NYU IT maturity across each of the ITIL/ITSM practices in alignment with ServiceLink. Using this model, they’ll establish a baseline score (from 1-5) and then work with our stakeholders to set an agreed-upon target state for where we want to be in approximately three years. Our goal is to:
- Evaluate our current ITSM maturity level across NYU IT services
- Establish a target-state maturity level to reach within three years
- Discover where we have strengths to leverage
- Understand where we have gaps to close
- Determine how best to sequence improvements across all ITSM practices
Our project roadmap will sequence our systematic improvements and feature projects that will improve shared management of ServiceLink configuration items, leverage the common services data model, and improve the quality of our data related to NYU IT’s services and assets.