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.
