The Next Era of IT Support: Embracing Predictive Maintenance and Proactive Solutions

Proactive and predictive IT support requires human-led, automation-powered solutions. This enables IT to improve downtime and user experience (UX). The challenge is finding the right real-world path to those goals in a timely, realistic, and cost-effective way.  

Businesses hear a lot about AI and automation as the means to that end. What they don’t hear is enough practical advice on how to implement and use them in real-world settings for measurable ROI gains. This is because many organizations lack a roadmap for planning broadly and implementing incrementally based on specific workflow and customer experience outcomes.  

IT leaders and stakeholders need a connected understanding of AI/automation’s role in ITSM in delivering predictive and proactive maintenance. These collectively form the foundation of effective vendor or bespoke solutions that drive IT support strategies. 

The Consulting Partner path to Practical AI/Automation-led ITSM Future

Global AI spending will double by 2028 to an expected $632 billion, with two-thirds spent on AI-enabled applications and platforms, according to IDC. This figure masks enormous product diversity, which is difficult for IT leaders to assess.  

The shared challenge for all IT leaders is ensuring a chosen vendor AI/automation application or platform will serve long-term IT support needs. Business stakeholders and the IT team’s shared focus on improving downtime and user/customer experience will only get them so far in the vetting process.  

The interconnecting highway of ITSM and its off ramps is the surest path to solving these specific problems with an actual solution. It’s still a complicated journey for the average SMB or enterprise. This is why many businesses benefit from a consulting, implementation, and change management partner with the right: 

• Experience 
• Track record of success 
• People 
• Forward-thinking perspective grounded in each business’s current workflows 

It takes all these attributes to plot a broad planning and incremental implementation course.  

The right consulting partner understands how multiple technologies and approaches work in actual businesses across countless scenarios. They have paved and traveled that ITSM highway since its early days and learned how best to adapt the use of AI and automation to meet real-world challenges through: 

• Automated Incident Management to diagnose and resolve IT issues autonomously, significantly reducing downtime and improving service availability

• Automating routine and more complex service desk operation request using chatbots and virtual assistants to optimize resource allocation, minimize downtime and increase productivity 

Intelligent process optimization for pattern and workflow analysis in IT service delivery to identify: 

• Bottlenecks 
• Gaps 
• Inefficiencies 

The future of IT support will increasingly rely on human-led AI/automation powered solutions for ITSM. The role of people and technology will change in this interaction, but it will always be based on transparent ways to deliver predictive maintenance and proactive solutions.

The transparent use of AI/automation in predictive maintenance and proactive solutions 

Every practical approach to predictive maintenance and proactive solutions in IT support uses AI and automation as tools within applications. This enables predictive and proactive maintenance based on regular feedback and interaction mechanisms. The best of these applications uses analytics in ways that:

• Work transparently 
• Drive feedback loops and continuous improvement from insights gathered by IT teams from workflows, users, and employees 
• Feed this data back into the applications to support fine tuning services to meet changing needs and expectations 

Moving from the hype and talk about AI to practical use is where AI becomes part of intelligent automation, which essentially becomes invisible as applications mask it. Behind the scenes is the data from disparate sources that drive them, which requires a future-proof approach to data management and application development. 

Balancing cost, time, and skill to integrate AI and automation into the business is key to answering whether any solution will have a tangible business impact. Each business’s defined KPIs is the means to identify that answer. Eliminating downtime and increasing end user/customer satisfaction are broad areas where KPIs can be defined by:  

• Customer satisfaction scores 
• Verifiable reduction in manual processes and time to completion 
• Workflow productivity increases and error/downtime decreases, among many others 

Using AI and automation for ITSM can lead to these when businesses use the right processes and tools based on defined KPIs. 

Earlier discussions about conversational AI chatbots for customer support or help desk/IT support show how businesses can implement AI and automation as RPA initiatives. But current and long-term success hinges on strategies that define what success looks like and the meticulous path to getting there.

Consulting Support for a Predictive/ Proactive ITSM Future  

SMBs and enterprises need to bridge the gap between automating simple tasks and moving to complex tasks with intelligent automation. Both require understanding how people do the work to increase efficiencies, avoid errors, and ultimately, learn from past interactions via data. 

The IT help desk and the customer support center can each be ITSM offramps to using AI and automation via: 

• Chatbot solutions that are rule based or conversational AI-based to solve end user/customer queries 
• Automation tools for automated ticket routing or predictive analytics to anticipate customer need based on historical feedback and queries  
• Agent-assist tools that use elements of the first two approaches 

They can all use historical data and customer/end user behavior patterns to: 

• Proactively address ongoing and new issues 
• Anticipate needs 
• Deliver personalized experiences 

These can all be near-term solutions to specific IT service and support needs. They will deliver greater success when implemented incrementally as part of a broader plan/strategy. While there is great potential reward for integrating AI/automation solutions into ITSM, it brings significant challenges. A recent joint study from the Service Desk Institute and ManageEngine shows 71% of organizations exploring AI in ITSM, but only 4% reaching that goal so far. 

Understanding where each element fits into a timeline based on prioritized needs and ROI can be difficult to determine for SMBs and enterprises since it’s difficult to balance: 

• Vendor/bespoke solutions 
• Internal expertise 
• Personnel needs 
• Time 
• Budgets 
• Training/change management 

The same challenges apply to AI/automation-enhanced business process management (BPM), robotic process mining (RPM) and its eventual realization of RPA.  

RPM precedes RPA and BPM with process survey, analysis and bottleneck identification. 

It also comes after these tools to monitor and measure improvements continuously.  

RPA can be easier to implement since it focuses on repeatable processes, while BPM is far more complex and time consuming to implement since it deals with processes across the business.

The role of AIOps in predictive IT maintenance and proactive solution  

The combination of artificial intelligence and IT operations (AIOps) is another path to predictive and proactive IT support. It uses data and machine learning (ML) to automate IT operations and processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination, according to Gartner’s definition.  

This ability to collect and monitor IT asset data from various sources is only possible with a deep understanding of data and analytics. The ability to focus on true alerts and see what matters most can enable proactive detection, diagnosis and resolution of issues to make things easier for IT and the service desk.

Improving downtime and UX with DEX 

Improving downtime and UX goes beyond the help desk, which is why digital employee experience (DEX) will grow in importance. Understanding IT infrastructure performance from the end-user perspective with DEX solutions enables proactive actions, such as: 

• Monitoring experience and performance  
• Root-cause analysis 
• Automated remediation in real-time  
• Remediation controlled by end users  

There are many vendor solution choices like ServiceNow for AIOps and DEX platforms like Omnissa, among others that can be standalone or integrated, but it's challenging for businesses to: 

• Know which to choose and when 
• Provide the expertise, and maintaining  
• Navigate the implementation, change management and training 

What, where, when and how to implement these different technologies, applications and platforms can often be obscured without a detailed digital strategy. The right strategy enables IT leaders and business stakeholders to place each one in a timeline based on a balance of all factors. This takes an integrated approach to IT operation optimization that only a consulting partner like Solugenix can deliver.

Why Solugenix is the Ideal Consulting Partner 

SMBs will need a service, engineering, implementation and talent support partner to make these things possible. Enterprises will need them for many of the same reasons on a larger scale. They both will need this support to integrate, plan broadly, and implement incrementally through predictive analysis approaches.

Predictive and proactive maintenance solutions that incorporate AI/automation need to be practical and accessible for organizations. This requires a level of scalability, flexibility, and a more vendor-agnostic approach to choosing and successfully implementing solutions. The ability to bring continuous monitoring and management support via predictive analytics also requires a deep understanding of data management.  

Solugenix has been providing this level of support to SMBs and enterprises across countless sectors. Our goal is to always leverage a practical, real-world understanding of all these aspects together. This is the only way to deliver true ROI via significant downtime reduction and improvements in workflow/ operations efficiency and end user/customer experience. 

To see how Solugenix can help your organization accomplish this, visit our Digital Strategy Services Page here.