Because a new year means reflection and anticipation, we thought we’d reflect on the content we produced in 2014 that was most popular. That reflection leads to anticipation of some trends and developments that may be important to you and your enterprise in the coming year.
First, our five most popular blog posts in 2014, in order of popularity.
- 6 Success Factors for Better Internal Audits
- Is Your Change Management Process Agile?
- What ITIL, ServiceNow, and Risk & Compliance Have in Common
- ITIL for Newbies…(Like Me) – a six-part series
- ServiceNow Governance – Air Traffic Control
Your apparent areas of interest in 2014 – largely processes and governance – tell us a few interesting things about what’s likely to occupy your time and interest in 2015. These are not presented in any particular order of importance.
1. You will spend more time developing and refining better processes for critical tasks and services, within and beyond IT. Wherever possible, you should augment your internal skills and knowledge with relevant, experienced outside help. This can range from traditional consulting to adoption and adaptation of tools such as the Unified Compliance Framework (UCF). Audit readiness, compliance, change management, and other critical functions require the best possible processes – and you can’t be expert in all of these by yourself.
Read: “Enterprise Service and Process Excellence: What It Is and How to Get It.”
2. ITIL is and should continue to be a critical element of your efforts to deliver, manage, and optimize IT and business processes and services. ITIL, formerly the IT Infrastructure Library, provides useful and widely adopted guidance and best practices for multiple IT functions. And as multiple Intréis clients know, when integrated with best practices for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) atop the ServiceNow platform, the same controls can deliver greater compliance and more effective business operations. This is strong incentive to provide and encourage comprehensive ITIL training for all who are responsible for service delivery and management within your organization.
3. Governance processes and best practices forged and proven in IT will, and should be, endorsed, promoted, and supported across your entire enterprise. The best governance is consistent across all enterprise operations. And the enterprise operation with what is arguably the longest successful experience with governance is IT. Particularly at enterprises deploying ServiceNow, IT is the ideal starting point for developing, implementing, optimizing, and extending governance best practices. Of course, your enterprise must develop and implement the best possible underlying processes and services first.
Read: “IT GRC to Enterprise GRC: 10 Tips toward a Holistic Approach”
“Wait a Minute – There’s More!”
By the way, our third most popular content was not a blog post, but our five-part video series on AJAX and how it can improve your ServiceNow user experience. This implies that 2015 will see many of you and your colleagues complaining or hearing more complaints about the user experiences of the software and services you use and/or deliver. It also implies that many of you and your colleagues will be investing more in improving those user experiences. If you’re using or considering ServiceNow, a great place to start is to dig more deeply into its integrated reporting and content management features.
Also, the next most popular piece of content after our top five was “Case Study: Integrating GRC and ITSM.” We hope that this affirms that you find discussion of the integration of GRC with service management valuable in your efforts to encourage service and process excellence across your enterprise. Because we plan to deliver more such discussion – and actual integrations – in 2015 and beyond, in our continuing efforts to deliver help and value to you and your colleagues.
