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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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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...