Optimizing IT Service Management for the Digital Age

Optimizing operations and services is always a moving target for IT service Management (ITSM) because of constant changes in:

• Hybrid remote, digital employee experience (DEX), and customer experience demands
• Technology and cyberthreats

It’s difficult making ITSM work holistically for your IT, workforce, and customers in a way that enhances operations and service delivery. You can see it in the global ITSM market’s expected $22.1 billion in revenues by 2028, according to MarketsandMarkets.

This blog looks beyond tool choices to practical ways to enhance ITSM operational and service value delivery to organizations and customers. Though ITSM goals remain unchanged, the path to success has evolved in the digital age.

ITSM Evolution in the Digital Age

ITSM has historically been about designing, delivering, managing, and improving IT services and operations to meet business needs. This has focused on how IT teams provide hardware, software, network management, and application support.

In the last decade, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) emerged to break down departmental silos by applying ITSM frameworks across the business. ITSM and ESM work together as the first attempts at unified service delivery across the enterprise. The broader goal of having a single services and operations delivery platform is still elusive in practice.

The path to this holistic services approach with verifiable business outcomes is more about how you optimize use of your chosen tools and methods.

Optimizing ITSM Tools, Methods & Processes

Every organization’s ITSM tools and methods are different. While most companies have at least one ITSM software tool/platform in use, others have several. their complexity versus user expertise and adoption varies widely across management, monitoring, and support. You can level the playing field by defining four important fundamentals of building a strong ITSM foundation based on strategies everyone can use.

1. Map your ITSM environment

The first thing to do is mapping your ITSM environment to understand the tool structure and what products and services they support. This map highlights gaps and bottlenecks in processes, workflows, and services.

2. Tool integrations

Creating a holistic operation and services environment requires real integration among ITSM tools. This is true for a leading platform like ServiceNow, which is designed for module and third-party tool integration. No matter what ITSM tools you use, integration comes down to knowing where you are with those existing tools and where you want to go.

System integration is about data synchronization via specified fields or statuses. Things like bidirectional, internal/external metadata and asset attribute synchronization are all part of integration decisions. You must have a plan of what you hope to accomplish with ITSM to understand and apply the tools, which hinges on how they:

• Use APIs, plug-ins and pre-built connectors to achieve integration for broad and specific business outcomes
• Exchange data and automate processes across platforms like CRM, ERP, and cloud services

3. Standardize processes

ITSM environment mapping informs integration, which guides process and workflow standardization. This is based on the tools and how they support the people, operations, and services. Driving this point home requires a general breakdown of the broader tools that go into ITSM, including:

• Service Desk Software
• IT Asset Management (ITAM)
• Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
• Change Management
• Incident and Problem Management
• Service Catalog Management
• Knowledge Management
• Performance and Availability Monitoring
• Reporting and Analytics Tools

The complexity of these ITSM tool categories and their integration becomes clearer when guided by a defined set of business outcomes.

4. ITSM AI, Automation and Orchestration

AI/ML and automation are vital to maximizing efficiency and accuracy with ITSM operations and services outcomes for every digital organization. They are among the top five ITSM trends for 2024 along with value demonstration and ESM, according to an ITSM.tools 2024 Trends Poll.

ITSM automation is a broad subject where tools and application vary across finance, retail and manufacturing as three sector examples. I’ve talked about robotic process automation (RPA) in retail, but it has nearly limitless operational service and workflow possibilities in every sector to deliver:

• Faster and more intuitive knowledge management for IT issues, answers, and constant improvement based on past issue analysis
• Real-time incident resolution and improved MTTR (mean time to resolution, repair, recovery respond, and resolve) via intelligent incident routing
• contextual conversations
• Personalized user preference-based support
• Faster access provisioning and password resets along with pre-defined AI chatbot dialog flow
• Automated monitoring and event management alerts or other incident or change management ITSM practices

AI/ML and automation in ITSM require a defined strategy to ensure the expected benefits. This is one of many areas where organizations must find the right balance between automation and human intervention in ITSM to maximize efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Balancing Automation & Human Intervention in ITSM

While generative AI, ML, and automation can bring greater efficiency to ITSM, they must be balanced with human intervention and collaboration. Only humans can bring the empathy, ethical decision-making, and complex problem-solving aspects.

Several important ways where these attributes should be applied are in intelligent chatbot development and continuous training. Defined training and upskilling pipelines for citizen developers using low code tools can be one part of the equation. You integrate this with traditional developer pipelines/oversight to foster a culture of continuous improvement throughout the organization.

This is true in major areas of ITSM, like the service desk, to broader aspects of the call center and customer support. Generative AI and ML can support ITSM improvements by speeding analytics, but you still need humans to:

• Parse interaction data for areas of poor communication
• Shape empathetic responses and apply emotional intelligence to advanced human interactions and AI chatbot development

This human and machine balance is one of many ITSM challenges, but there are ways to overcome them.

Challenges & Answers to Modern ITSM Practices

ITSM processes are inherently challenging across an organization for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons are broadly shared across all organizations and sectors. These processes include integration, budgets, tools, training, user adoption, and personnel, which you can only overcome with clear objectives that are:

• Specific to your broader organization and business goals
• Easily monitored and measurable via KPIs based on those specific goals
• Achievable in defined time frames based on those KPIs
• Scalable and repeatable across the organization
• Adaptable to changing needs

These objectives must be based on a continuous improvement model that establishes:

• A center of excellence
• Ongoing training
• Constant communication outreach
• Defined skilled personnel consulting pipeline

Solugenix helps organizations develop this approach to maximize ServiceNow ROI, but it should be foundational to any ITSM tools or platform strategy. This helps organizations adjust to future trends and innovations shaping ITSM.

The Future of ITSM

Many ITSM trends and innovations in the future will grow out of generative AI and automation. It's predicted that 85% of infrastructure and operations leaders will significantly increase automation by 2025, according to a Gartner survey.

These trends will have a big impact on your organization’s ability to overcome challenges and realize operational and service level benefits with an aspect like:

• Faster time to market for application-based services and operation workflows via:
• Advanced chatbots and ticketing systems
• Automation and analysis for incident, change, knowledge, asset and security management

Past blogs have discussed how low code/citizen developers, RPA, and generative AI fueled by large language models are driving the future of digital transformation. Other approaches like AIOps (the convergence of AI and IT operations) focus on speeding up IT system anomaly detection and resolution.

All these trends and innovations are rooted in the concept of making IT services a value center for the entire organization. Leading ITSM platforms like ServiceNow have integrated these tools into their platforms to help lower costs and increase ROI/workflow efficiency and innovation.

They are part of a larger trend to make ITSM and ESM work holistically towards end-to-end integration. But like all aspects of ITSM and these trends, they can add complexity in some ways while removing it in others.

While there are no universal answers to maximizing efficiency and minimizing complexity in a single approach to digital age ITSM, two things can put you on the right track:

• Finding the right consulting partner to support technology solutions, processes, implementation, talent, training, and managed services
• Developing a clear strategy that defines where you are now, where you want to go, and what you want to accomplish with ITSM

These types of relationships and approaches can be invaluable in every sector such as financial services and retail, among others. ITSM is the linchpin that keeps your organization rolling. Making that linchpin stronger often requires support to help you effectively navigate future rocky terrain.