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2020 ITSM Predictions

As part of APMdigest's 2020 predictions, industry experts offer predictions on how ITSM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020.

Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions

APM SUPPORTS ITIL 4

APM will play a key role in supporting the new ITIL 4 framework by enhancing its predictive modeling and proactive monitoring capabilities to assist IT Service Management (ITSM). The workflow and reporting will be dynamic enough to present intrinsic datasets to support the very different demands for both Development and Operations.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn

CUSTOMER-CENTRIC THINKING

In 2020, the accelerated adoption of a combination of advanced automation techniques (i.e., RPA, deep learning, natural language processing) will notably increase the throughput of multiple ITSM processes and functions, increasing the service quality of IT departments while decreasing costs. Value must be a core principle in the provision of service and will require customer-centric thinking.
Olivier Saucin
Global Solution Director, Applications, CTG

ACTIONABILITY

Businesses will make progress moving toward an autonomous digital enterprise through technology innovations in AIOps, edge computing, the convergence of IT service management and IT operations management, SecOps, and DevOps. Rather than focusing on monitoring and observability — which only tell you what failed and why — businesses need to look at "actionability." Actionability takes it an important step further by giving actionable insights to help remediate while also helping to predict what could fail. Implementing technology that gives actionable insights will be critical for businesses looking to move further in their automation journey.
Ram Chakravarti
CTO, BMC Software

AUTOMATED INCIDENT RESOLUTION

When it comes to ITSM, and its manifestation beyond IT of Enterprise Service Management, we're going to see increased adoption of AI-driven automation — moving beyond service request resolution to automated incident resolution. Analytics, in general and predictive analytics to be specific will be used increasingly to drive decision-making proactively.
Dr. Akhil Sahai
CPO, Symphony SummitAI

24-HOUR IT

With the arrival of the new decade, IT organizations will begin a more concerted push to offer all IT services 24x7 to meet the expectations of around-the-clock business operations. New focus will be given to automation that supports this "always open" IT concept, so that IT never stands in the way of business requirements — regardless of the hour.
Kevin J. Smith
SVP, Ivanti

IMPROVED INTEGRATION

Based on reviews of ITSM software and tools on IT Central Station, our community members want better integration capabilities with reduced costs from their ITSM software and tools. In 2020, ITSM vendors who design better integration capabilities into their software and tools, while keeping costs low, will be addressing real user pain points.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

DEVOPS MEETS ITSM

As businesses struggle to keep pace with customer expectations, they will see the need to adopt DevOps practices in all parts of their business, including mission-critical applications like the contact center that have thus far remained siloed and out of scope for DevOps initiatives. The implementation of DevOps as a catalyst for CX innovation in the contact center will break down CX system silos and fuel momentum of the drive towards cloud contact centers.
Elizabeth Magill
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Cyara

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT VS ENGINEERING

As is already being observed in smaller organizations, in 2020, the subservience of incident management organizations to engineering organizations will spread to larger enterprises as well. Companies are increasingly automating ITIL and ITSM. Those professionals that are impacted will be redeployed to positions that create even greater business value.
Paul Porter
VP Sales Engineering, xMatters

ITSM ALIGNS WITH THE BUSINESS

By the end of 2020, IT service management (ITSM) teams will decrease their focus on traditional ITSM best practices and instead focus on business alignment strategies. This new alignment will center more on automation and the speed of delivery than typical service management methods to ensure that service management is as dynamic and agile as the business processes it serves.
Kevin J. Smith
SVP, Ivanti

ITOM CONVERGES WITH SECURITY

The convergence of security and ITOM is just beginning to happen, we should continue to see more of this convergence play out, but many companies have struggled to fill the gap between the two groups, while there are only a few companies showing promise here.
Thomas Hatch
CTO and Co-Founder, SaltStack

Go to 2020 Digital Transformation Predictions

Hot Topics

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

2020 ITSM Predictions

As part of APMdigest's 2020 predictions, industry experts offer predictions on how ITSM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020.

Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions

APM SUPPORTS ITIL 4

APM will play a key role in supporting the new ITIL 4 framework by enhancing its predictive modeling and proactive monitoring capabilities to assist IT Service Management (ITSM). The workflow and reporting will be dynamic enough to present intrinsic datasets to support the very different demands for both Development and Operations.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn

CUSTOMER-CENTRIC THINKING

In 2020, the accelerated adoption of a combination of advanced automation techniques (i.e., RPA, deep learning, natural language processing) will notably increase the throughput of multiple ITSM processes and functions, increasing the service quality of IT departments while decreasing costs. Value must be a core principle in the provision of service and will require customer-centric thinking.
Olivier Saucin
Global Solution Director, Applications, CTG

ACTIONABILITY

Businesses will make progress moving toward an autonomous digital enterprise through technology innovations in AIOps, edge computing, the convergence of IT service management and IT operations management, SecOps, and DevOps. Rather than focusing on monitoring and observability — which only tell you what failed and why — businesses need to look at "actionability." Actionability takes it an important step further by giving actionable insights to help remediate while also helping to predict what could fail. Implementing technology that gives actionable insights will be critical for businesses looking to move further in their automation journey.
Ram Chakravarti
CTO, BMC Software

AUTOMATED INCIDENT RESOLUTION

When it comes to ITSM, and its manifestation beyond IT of Enterprise Service Management, we're going to see increased adoption of AI-driven automation — moving beyond service request resolution to automated incident resolution. Analytics, in general and predictive analytics to be specific will be used increasingly to drive decision-making proactively.
Dr. Akhil Sahai
CPO, Symphony SummitAI

24-HOUR IT

With the arrival of the new decade, IT organizations will begin a more concerted push to offer all IT services 24x7 to meet the expectations of around-the-clock business operations. New focus will be given to automation that supports this "always open" IT concept, so that IT never stands in the way of business requirements — regardless of the hour.
Kevin J. Smith
SVP, Ivanti

IMPROVED INTEGRATION

Based on reviews of ITSM software and tools on IT Central Station, our community members want better integration capabilities with reduced costs from their ITSM software and tools. In 2020, ITSM vendors who design better integration capabilities into their software and tools, while keeping costs low, will be addressing real user pain points.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

DEVOPS MEETS ITSM

As businesses struggle to keep pace with customer expectations, they will see the need to adopt DevOps practices in all parts of their business, including mission-critical applications like the contact center that have thus far remained siloed and out of scope for DevOps initiatives. The implementation of DevOps as a catalyst for CX innovation in the contact center will break down CX system silos and fuel momentum of the drive towards cloud contact centers.
Elizabeth Magill
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Cyara

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT VS ENGINEERING

As is already being observed in smaller organizations, in 2020, the subservience of incident management organizations to engineering organizations will spread to larger enterprises as well. Companies are increasingly automating ITIL and ITSM. Those professionals that are impacted will be redeployed to positions that create even greater business value.
Paul Porter
VP Sales Engineering, xMatters

ITSM ALIGNS WITH THE BUSINESS

By the end of 2020, IT service management (ITSM) teams will decrease their focus on traditional ITSM best practices and instead focus on business alignment strategies. This new alignment will center more on automation and the speed of delivery than typical service management methods to ensure that service management is as dynamic and agile as the business processes it serves.
Kevin J. Smith
SVP, Ivanti

ITOM CONVERGES WITH SECURITY

The convergence of security and ITOM is just beginning to happen, we should continue to see more of this convergence play out, but many companies have struggled to fill the gap between the two groups, while there are only a few companies showing promise here.
Thomas Hatch
CTO and Co-Founder, SaltStack

Go to 2020 Digital Transformation Predictions

Hot Topics

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...