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ITSM That's Ready When Tomorrow Happens Today

Valerie O'Connell
EMA

In ancient times — February 2020 — EMA research found that more than 50% of IT leaders surveyed were considering new ITSM platforms in the near future. The future arrived with a bang as IT organizations turbo-pivoted to deliver and support unprecedented levels and types of services to a global workplace suddenly working from home.

Overnight, ITSM organizations aimed existing platforms, people, and processes at the moving target of unprecedented and unpredictable change. Their aim has been surprisingly good. Although there have been some public glitches, the move from fire drill to productivity has largely avoided chaos as an interim step — but success has been neither universal nor smooth.

From Competitive Advantage to Competitive Table Stakes

Organizations that were advanced in their digital transformation agendas were also well-placed to take these changes in stride. Across industries and organizations of all sizes, change is the new normal. Always a desirable attribute, the ability to support business in a rolling sequence of scenarios is now a baseline requirement. That ability, which was formerly seen as a competitive advantage, has been promoted to competitive table stakes.

EMA research indicates that the installed base of ITSM platforms and solutions is a very mature one. More than half have been in place for three years or more, with 20% passing the five-year mark. If half of EMA's survey base was exploring new options back in February of 2020, it is logical to assume that the experiences since that time will swell the ranks of ITSM shoppers in the near future (1-2 years).

What should they be looking for?

Of course, they should be looking first at their own environments, objectives, advantages, and challenges to formulate requirements specific to the needs of their organizations. It is a mistake to choose a solution primarily because it has been named a winner, crowned in the vacuum of pure theory and features. When EMA ranks vendor solutions, it does so within the context of use cases and requirements rather than against static feature weightings.

However, there are foundational characteristics and attributes that can inform the vendor selection process. The goal is an ITSM function that facilitates today's business and is continually tomorrow-ready no matter what tomorrow may bring or how often tomorrow changes its mind.

Three Strategic Considerations for Tomorrow-Ready ITSM

Beyond the specifics of platform or solution functionality, there are three overarching strategic areas of consideration:

Ongoing transformation and innovation: The phrase "get back to normal" represents an understandable but wrong-headed sentiment. There is no going back. Normal is a state of change. Organizations have the opportunity to not only do better now, but to do things differently. EMA research finds that scalability, extensibility, and ease of both integration and use are the primary attributes of a successful, agile, strategic ITSM investment decision.

Automation: Part cliché, part mandate, the drive to do more with less has been a constant presence in IT since the earliest mainframe. The challenge remains current; the opportunities change with time. Technology and vision are finally on par. With automation today, ITSM organizations have the chance to radically alter and redefine the types, quality, and speed of service it offers and supports. EMA research shows that automation can be a double-edged sword. ITSM platforms must be capable of vigorously incorporating automation, while pacing implementation to an organization's ability to productively consume it.

End-user experience and productivity: As the lines between business and IT rapidly blur, end-user experience has become almost indistinguishable from productivity. ITSM platforms need to deliver services that are meaningful in purpose and excellent in execution to both internal and external users. Whether offering non-IT functionality in enterprise service management (ESM) offerings, a range of self-service capabilities, or the DevOps advantage of bringing code closer to its performance, ITSM solutions must be flexible and innovative to consistently meet and exceed user expectations for service excellence.

ITSM is logically positioned to drive innovation, unite automation initiatives, and unify collaborative, cross-functional processes. However, the ability to execute requires a strategic vision and valuation of the ITSM function and an ITSM platform that is ready when tomorrow happens today.

Tomorrow-ready ITSM today: 3 key strategies, EMA webinar

Join EMA research director Valerie O'Connell for a research-informed drilldown on these key strategies for an ITSM function that will thrive long past this current crisis.

Date: June 4, 2020

Register for the webinar.

Valerie O'Connell is EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

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Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

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Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

ITSM That's Ready When Tomorrow Happens Today

Valerie O'Connell
EMA

In ancient times — February 2020 — EMA research found that more than 50% of IT leaders surveyed were considering new ITSM platforms in the near future. The future arrived with a bang as IT organizations turbo-pivoted to deliver and support unprecedented levels and types of services to a global workplace suddenly working from home.

Overnight, ITSM organizations aimed existing platforms, people, and processes at the moving target of unprecedented and unpredictable change. Their aim has been surprisingly good. Although there have been some public glitches, the move from fire drill to productivity has largely avoided chaos as an interim step — but success has been neither universal nor smooth.

From Competitive Advantage to Competitive Table Stakes

Organizations that were advanced in their digital transformation agendas were also well-placed to take these changes in stride. Across industries and organizations of all sizes, change is the new normal. Always a desirable attribute, the ability to support business in a rolling sequence of scenarios is now a baseline requirement. That ability, which was formerly seen as a competitive advantage, has been promoted to competitive table stakes.

EMA research indicates that the installed base of ITSM platforms and solutions is a very mature one. More than half have been in place for three years or more, with 20% passing the five-year mark. If half of EMA's survey base was exploring new options back in February of 2020, it is logical to assume that the experiences since that time will swell the ranks of ITSM shoppers in the near future (1-2 years).

What should they be looking for?

Of course, they should be looking first at their own environments, objectives, advantages, and challenges to formulate requirements specific to the needs of their organizations. It is a mistake to choose a solution primarily because it has been named a winner, crowned in the vacuum of pure theory and features. When EMA ranks vendor solutions, it does so within the context of use cases and requirements rather than against static feature weightings.

However, there are foundational characteristics and attributes that can inform the vendor selection process. The goal is an ITSM function that facilitates today's business and is continually tomorrow-ready no matter what tomorrow may bring or how often tomorrow changes its mind.

Three Strategic Considerations for Tomorrow-Ready ITSM

Beyond the specifics of platform or solution functionality, there are three overarching strategic areas of consideration:

Ongoing transformation and innovation: The phrase "get back to normal" represents an understandable but wrong-headed sentiment. There is no going back. Normal is a state of change. Organizations have the opportunity to not only do better now, but to do things differently. EMA research finds that scalability, extensibility, and ease of both integration and use are the primary attributes of a successful, agile, strategic ITSM investment decision.

Automation: Part cliché, part mandate, the drive to do more with less has been a constant presence in IT since the earliest mainframe. The challenge remains current; the opportunities change with time. Technology and vision are finally on par. With automation today, ITSM organizations have the chance to radically alter and redefine the types, quality, and speed of service it offers and supports. EMA research shows that automation can be a double-edged sword. ITSM platforms must be capable of vigorously incorporating automation, while pacing implementation to an organization's ability to productively consume it.

End-user experience and productivity: As the lines between business and IT rapidly blur, end-user experience has become almost indistinguishable from productivity. ITSM platforms need to deliver services that are meaningful in purpose and excellent in execution to both internal and external users. Whether offering non-IT functionality in enterprise service management (ESM) offerings, a range of self-service capabilities, or the DevOps advantage of bringing code closer to its performance, ITSM solutions must be flexible and innovative to consistently meet and exceed user expectations for service excellence.

ITSM is logically positioned to drive innovation, unite automation initiatives, and unify collaborative, cross-functional processes. However, the ability to execute requires a strategic vision and valuation of the ITSM function and an ITSM platform that is ready when tomorrow happens today.

Tomorrow-ready ITSM today: 3 key strategies, EMA webinar

Join EMA research director Valerie O'Connell for a research-informed drilldown on these key strategies for an ITSM function that will thrive long past this current crisis.

Date: June 4, 2020

Register for the webinar.

Valerie O'Connell is EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...