ServiceTeam ITSM: Why and How your ITSM Capabilities Need to Change

By Stephen Mann

If you know your ITIL history, you might think that IT service management capabilities have remained somewhat static over the last thirty years. However, there has been significant change over this period – with technology becoming an even more important corporate capability and ITSM capabilities changing to reflect this and the added complexity in IT infrastructures.

Right now, though, the ITSM industry is experiencing more change than ever, impacting what ITSM is and how it is used. The bottom line is that your organization’s ITSM capabilities will likely need to change to reflect three key ITSM trends:

Employee experience
Enterprise service management
Artificial intelligence (AI).

To help, this blog examines these three ITSM trends to explain why and how your corporate ITSM capabilities need to change.

1. Employee experience

The need for better employee or end-user experiences started nearly a decade ago but has grown rapidly in recent years. However, while “experience” is now an oft-used term in service management, there’s still much for IT service providers to do to measure and improve the IT experiences provided to end-users.

The ITSM industry has finally woken up to the many issues of its traditional metrics – with them overly focused on the “mechanics” of IT service delivery and support. The metrics usually measure IT performance from the service provider’s perspective. They also fail to identify “hidden” issues and how these adversely affect end-user productivity. For example, end-users experience issues with IT service desk ticket reassignments or friction with IT self-service capabilities. The three trends are linked here – with the ability to better understand service delivery and support issues relevant to other internal service providers and AI capabilities potentially part of the various solutions to common employee experience issues.

There are two perspectives on how employee experience impacts corporate ITSM capabilities. First, there’s how an IT service provider delivers better end-user experiences. Second, there are the IT-user experiences to consider. Both perspectives will change the future positioning of ITSM strategies. For example, focusing on end-user experiences and their improvement means that IT decisions and strategy are increasingly concerned with better outcomes. This drives changes in IT policies, processes, technologies, and culture.

Meeting employee experience needs is a high-priority area for IT organizations – in terms of both the corporate approach to IT service delivery and support and ITSM tool capabilities. Measuring employee experiences will be a necessary foundation for this focus. It can also help with change. For example, introducing AI-enabled capabilities – identifying where AI will offer the most significant business benefits and how its introduction is affecting employee experiences and productivity.

2. Enterprise service management

As an ITSM trend, enterprise service management is even older than experience management. However, the approach has evolved considerably from its “lift and drop of the ITSM tool” origins.

Enterprise service management is now seen as a proven method for delivering the digital transformation or digital enablement capabilities required by other business functions such as human resources (HR), facilities, finance, and legal. Supplementing business-function-specific tool features with the work optimization capabilities available in ITSM tools.

The bottom line for ITSM capabilities is that tool requirements and operational changes no longer only affect IT. Instead, they now potentially impact other business functions, too. So, whether it’s the selection of a new ITSM tool or the introduction of experience management or AI-enabled capabilities, the requirements and impact go beyond the needs of IT. For example, the selection of a new ITSM tool not only needs to include requirements related to the enterprise service management use case but there will likely also be capabilities and weightings that are influenced by non-IT needs.

Ultimately, though, while this “extension of needs” makes change activities more challenging, there’s a corresponding increase in business benefits to outweigh this:

The corporate ITSM tool serves more than just the IT organization, offering better operations and outcomes across the enterprise (and a higher tool return on investment (ROI))
Experience management capabilities will improve employee experiences and productivity across multiple internal service providers
Business functions can introduce AI-enabled capabilities more easily (and cheaply) using the corporate ITSM tool or platform.

However, what might be considered the most significant benefit is that employees receive consistent and better service experiences across multiple internal service providers.

3. Artificial intelligence

The use of AI in ITSM, especially the rapid adoption of generative AI (GenAI) in the shadow of ChatGPT’s success, is the ITSM trend that most ITSM professionals are focused on in 2024. They have moved from wanting to know what AI means for ITSM capabilities to needing best practice guidance for its successful adoption.

Part of this is understanding how AI-enabled capabilities affect ITSM. After all, it’s not simply the introduction of new technology. Instead, the impact on processes and people should not be underestimated. So, while ITSM capabilities will change based on AI-capabilities facilitating activities such as:

Ticket triage
Knowledge management
Self-service
Decision-making and continual improvement
Content creation
Infrastructure and application monitoring.

The impact on people (IT staff and the people they serve) must be carefully managed. A good example is the impact of AI introduction on IT service desk agents and managers.

Finally, all of this AI-related change isn’t limited to IT. Whether shared via an enterprise service management approach or independently provided to other business functions, there will be similar (and perhaps even more challenging) people issues to tackle. With AI’s introduction focused on experience improvement and not just speed, scalability, and cost reduction.

All three ITSM trends will change ITSM capabilities.

For further information regarding some of the points raised, you can check out these resources:

Whitepaper: Cloud Lighthouse Crafting Your Future-Ready Enterprise AI Strategy

Blog Post: A New Era of Service Desk Operations

Blog Post: AI Driven ITSM: Pioneering Workload Management for the Future

Blog Post: Microsoft Copilot: The AI and Automation Opportunity for ITSM

Blog Post: AI’s Potential Role in IT Service Management

Stephen Mann is Principal Analyst and Content Director at the ITSM-focused industry analyst firm ITSM.tools. Also an independent IT and IT service management marketing content creator, and a frequent blogger, writer, and presenter on the challenges and opportunities for IT service management professionals.