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The Future of ITSM: How Are Roles (and Rules) Changing? Part 1

Dennis Drogseth

Both the “rules” and the “roles” governing IT Service Management (ITSM) are evolving to support a far-broader need for inclusiveness across IT, and between IT and its service consumers. Recent EMA research, What Is the Future of IT Service Management? (March 2015), exposed a number of shifting trends that might surprise many in the industry.

In our research, we approached ITSM not only as a set of service management processes, but we also viewed it in the context of recent trends in technology adoption and evolving organizational models. The research spanned 270 respondents in North America and Europe — in roles ranging from executives, to service desk professionals, to operations, and even development personnel — all of whom were actively engaged in ITSM in some way. Company/organizational size was a good mix, as well, ranging in size from 500 employees to more than 20,000 employees. Nearly 50% of those surveyed indicated that their ITSM teams were slated for growth. Another 35% were remaining the same, and only 15% were shrinking in size.

Probably the first thing that stood out in the survey responses was that there is a growing need to more fully integrate the service desk with operations beyond traditional trouble ticketing. This requirement is changing both the roles and the rules of ITSM, especially among the more successful ITSM teams, where dialog between service management professionals and core operations experts is becoming more multifaceted and more service-aware than in the past. In many cases, the more effective ITSM teams are increasingly helping to coordinate and focus operational experts in support of business needs.

Our data showed that the top three strategic priorities for ITSM teams were the following:

■ Improved user experience for internal service consumers (end users)

■ Improved operations-to–service desk integrations for incident and problem management

■ Improved operations-to–service desk integrations for configuration and change management

All three data points call out for stronger operations-to-ITSM integrations — in terms of workflow, analytics, and automation, as well as effective role-aware visualization. As an added confirmation, 55% of our respondents felt that “big data analytics for IT” belong equally to ITSM and operations, and 14% believed that big data was primarily the province of the ITSM team.

Another surprising finding that supports integrated operations was that, for the first time ever, “performance-related service impact” was the dominant use case for CMDB/CMS deployments — followed by asset and change management — once again emphasizing the need to optimize the delivery of critical IT application services and, hence, improve the end-user experience.

Read Part 2 of this blog

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The Future of ITSM: How Are Roles (and Rules) Changing? Part 1

Dennis Drogseth

Both the “rules” and the “roles” governing IT Service Management (ITSM) are evolving to support a far-broader need for inclusiveness across IT, and between IT and its service consumers. Recent EMA research, What Is the Future of IT Service Management? (March 2015), exposed a number of shifting trends that might surprise many in the industry.

In our research, we approached ITSM not only as a set of service management processes, but we also viewed it in the context of recent trends in technology adoption and evolving organizational models. The research spanned 270 respondents in North America and Europe — in roles ranging from executives, to service desk professionals, to operations, and even development personnel — all of whom were actively engaged in ITSM in some way. Company/organizational size was a good mix, as well, ranging in size from 500 employees to more than 20,000 employees. Nearly 50% of those surveyed indicated that their ITSM teams were slated for growth. Another 35% were remaining the same, and only 15% were shrinking in size.

Probably the first thing that stood out in the survey responses was that there is a growing need to more fully integrate the service desk with operations beyond traditional trouble ticketing. This requirement is changing both the roles and the rules of ITSM, especially among the more successful ITSM teams, where dialog between service management professionals and core operations experts is becoming more multifaceted and more service-aware than in the past. In many cases, the more effective ITSM teams are increasingly helping to coordinate and focus operational experts in support of business needs.

Our data showed that the top three strategic priorities for ITSM teams were the following:

■ Improved user experience for internal service consumers (end users)

■ Improved operations-to–service desk integrations for incident and problem management

■ Improved operations-to–service desk integrations for configuration and change management

All three data points call out for stronger operations-to-ITSM integrations — in terms of workflow, analytics, and automation, as well as effective role-aware visualization. As an added confirmation, 55% of our respondents felt that “big data analytics for IT” belong equally to ITSM and operations, and 14% believed that big data was primarily the province of the ITSM team.

Another surprising finding that supports integrated operations was that, for the first time ever, “performance-related service impact” was the dominant use case for CMDB/CMS deployments — followed by asset and change management — once again emphasizing the need to optimize the delivery of critical IT application services and, hence, improve the end-user experience.

Read Part 2 of this blog

Image removed.

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

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Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...