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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.

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...