Future of ITSM

IT support has evolved over the years, dictated by factors like business needs, work culture, technological innovations, and the ever-changing IT landscape. IT help desks have transformed into IT service desks which handle a wider spectrum of IT operations and better align with strategic business goals. These IT service desks are supported by ITSM tools that provide increased functionality and usability. The road, of course, doesn't end here; ITSM is bound to continue to evolve. Here are some hot trends which will fuel the evolution of ITSM in the coming years.

Rising focus on consumer experience

The role of IT support is to make sure that IT services help employees with their work. Increased expectations of IT employees have shifted the focus of IT towards providing a better consumer experience. This includes enabling a multichannel communication process, introducing chatbots, as well as providing a compelling IT shopping experience with service catalogs and promoting self-help with access to a knowledge base. Providing a better consumer experience improves the IT department's reputation and creates a work environment free of frustration for both end users and IT technicians.

Compulsion to automate

One reason for the push to automate is that some security standards are based on service industry standard best practices; many organizations are well aware that implementing these best practices can help them sail through compliance audits. Extending automation to other workflows and processes can help decrease inconsistencies and increase efficiency in help desk operations as well. With the automation of help desk tasks, end users benefit from improved resolution times.

Coping with BYOD culture

Whether an organization decides to adopt a bring your own device (BYOD), bring your own technology (BYOT), or choose your own device (CYOD) culture, these up-and-coming IT policies always carry the threat of shadow IT. With BYOD, challenges arise in terms of asset management, software license compliance, and extending IT support to a wider range of devices. Without a proper strategy to handle this culture, businesses can face increased IT costs and business disruptions. BYOD adds to the complexity of an IT environment, making impact analysis during a problem more challenging due to low visibility on employees' personal devices. Mobile device management capabilities like remotely wiping devices, deploying profiles, restricting devices' access to Wi-Fi and VPN, and adjusting devices' email settings could help technicians cope with this BYOD culture.

Ascension of the "social IT" approach

The current generation of IT consumers are increasingly submitting incidents or requests through social media rather than conventional methods like email. Based on this trend, IT help desk technicians can leverage the power of social media as a powerful ITSM enabler. You should look into integrating social media platforms with your help desk tools to allow your help desk technicians to receive and respond to tickets, converse with end users, and resolve issues.

Demand for business intelligence to support critical decisions

With multiple touch points across an organization, IT has access to a huge volume of data, which can be used to generate business-critical insights. These insights can reveal problems in business and IT at the earliest stage, reducing costs and risks while increasing the quality of IT service delivery. Help desk software has started integrating with business intelligence solutions to mine valuable information from help desk data. For example, a basic SLA compliance level chart only indicates when SLA compliance levels sky-rocket or plunge, but doesn't necessarily help you understand why SLA levels are changing. Performing deep dive analytics with business intelligence tools can help identify the factors that are negatively affecting SLA compliance levels and the ways to fix them.

Emphasis on enterprise service management (ESM)

ESM is expected to be a natural successor of ITSM. ESM is all about applying the principles, processes, and best practices of IT service delivery to every functional area within a business. ESM helps effectively integrate different departments and facilitates quicker flow of operations across departments. Though many vendors have already started talking about ESM capabilities in their tools, for now a complete ESM solution is only a vision that the industry is moving towards.

Adopting the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)

AI technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics have started redefining the way people live and work. And they will eventually make their way into IT service desks. The first and most noticable impact of AI on IT service desks will be chatbots and virtual service assistants that might one day replace humans as the first touch point of an IT service desk. Machine learning, a type of AI, on the other hand, will provide IT service desks with tools that have the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. With machine learning, IT help desks will be able to:

• Predict issues and problems proactively.
• Improve search capabilities and knowledge management.
• Classify and route issues more easily.

These seven trends have the power to shape the future of ITSM, but ManageEngine's ITSM Future Readiness Survey Report points to even more advances in ITSM.

While implementing ITSM processes in your organization, you should ensure that your prospective ITSM solution is capable enough to address trends and provide a competent, future-proof way to deliver better IT services.