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The Future of ITSM: How Are Roles (and Rules) Changing? Part 2

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.

Start with Part 1 of this blog

Research highlights show the following trends in rules and roles:

■ Cloud continues to be a game changer. ITSM teams are playing a more dynamic and service-aware role in managing cloud investments through a growing focus on such things as higher levels of automation and more attention to DevOps. ITSM teams are also integrating cloud services into their service catalogs — with SaaS (internal cloud) services, IaaS (internal cloud) services, and SaaS and IaaS services in public cloud tied for third.

■ The move to support enterprise services is also changing ITSM rules and roles. Only 89% of respondents had plans to consolidate IT and non-IT customer service — up from just two years ago when only 75% had plans to consolidate.

■ Mobility is seriously changing the ITSM game — in terms of both improved IT efficiencies and end-user outreach. 85% of our respondents had mobile support for end users, often across heterogeneous environments (tablets, iPhones, and Android phones, as examples). And 50% allowed end users to make ITSM-related service requests via these devices, making ITSM teams, and IT as a whole, considerably more consumer-friendly.

■ In parallel, the demand for more unified and effective endpoint management is expanding the requirements for role-based expertise. The leading requirements/skills here include capturing software usage, software license management, software distribution, operating system deployment, and patch management — across a fully heterogeneous set of endpoint options.

We also looked at success rates in an attempt to understand the chemistry of the most successful ITSM teams. To do this, we contrasted the 18% of respondents who viewed their ITSM initiative as “extremely successful” with the 12% who felt they were only “somewhat successful” or were “largely unsuccessful”. Those who were “extremely successful” were also:

■ Four times more likely to have integrated their IT and non-IT service desks

■ Twice as likely to have a CMDB/CMS-related technology deployed

■ Dramatically more likely to support cloud in service catalogs

■ Twice as likely to be leveraging mobile for ITSM professionals

■ Nearly four times more likely to offer service consumers mobile support for ITSM-related actions

■ Twice as likely to offer users access to corporate applications through mobile

■ More than twice as likely to be slated for growth

Overall, the news seems encouraging for ITSM teams willing to reach out and embrace a growing set of technologies and responsibilities. This means being ready to support new roles and expertise, while promoting more informed dialog, both between enterprise end-users and the service desk and between ITSM teams and the rest of IT — including operations and development. The news is probably not so good for the fainthearted seeking to cling to traditional ways of working in an “ITSM silo.” In other words, both the need and the opportunity for ITSM leadership awaits you — and our data suggests that the time to engage is now.

Image removed.

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The Future of ITSM: How Are Roles (and Rules) Changing? Part 2

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.

Start with Part 1 of this blog

Research highlights show the following trends in rules and roles:

■ Cloud continues to be a game changer. ITSM teams are playing a more dynamic and service-aware role in managing cloud investments through a growing focus on such things as higher levels of automation and more attention to DevOps. ITSM teams are also integrating cloud services into their service catalogs — with SaaS (internal cloud) services, IaaS (internal cloud) services, and SaaS and IaaS services in public cloud tied for third.

■ The move to support enterprise services is also changing ITSM rules and roles. Only 89% of respondents had plans to consolidate IT and non-IT customer service — up from just two years ago when only 75% had plans to consolidate.

■ Mobility is seriously changing the ITSM game — in terms of both improved IT efficiencies and end-user outreach. 85% of our respondents had mobile support for end users, often across heterogeneous environments (tablets, iPhones, and Android phones, as examples). And 50% allowed end users to make ITSM-related service requests via these devices, making ITSM teams, and IT as a whole, considerably more consumer-friendly.

■ In parallel, the demand for more unified and effective endpoint management is expanding the requirements for role-based expertise. The leading requirements/skills here include capturing software usage, software license management, software distribution, operating system deployment, and patch management — across a fully heterogeneous set of endpoint options.

We also looked at success rates in an attempt to understand the chemistry of the most successful ITSM teams. To do this, we contrasted the 18% of respondents who viewed their ITSM initiative as “extremely successful” with the 12% who felt they were only “somewhat successful” or were “largely unsuccessful”. Those who were “extremely successful” were also:

■ Four times more likely to have integrated their IT and non-IT service desks

■ Twice as likely to have a CMDB/CMS-related technology deployed

■ Dramatically more likely to support cloud in service catalogs

■ Twice as likely to be leveraging mobile for ITSM professionals

■ Nearly four times more likely to offer service consumers mobile support for ITSM-related actions

■ Twice as likely to offer users access to corporate applications through mobile

■ More than twice as likely to be slated for growth

Overall, the news seems encouraging for ITSM teams willing to reach out and embrace a growing set of technologies and responsibilities. This means being ready to support new roles and expertise, while promoting more informed dialog, both between enterprise end-users and the service desk and between ITSM teams and the rest of IT — including operations and development. The news is probably not so good for the fainthearted seeking to cling to traditional ways of working in an “ITSM silo.” In other words, both the need and the opportunity for ITSM leadership awaits you — and our data suggests that the time to engage is now.

Image removed.

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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 ...

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 ...