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
The Latest
The Internet played a greater role than ever in supporting enterprise productivity over the past year-plus, as newly remote workers logged onto the job via residential links that, it turns out, left much to be desired in terms of enabling work ...
The world's appetite for cloud services has increased but now, more than 18 months since the beginning of the pandemic, organizations are assessing their cloud spend and trying to better understand the IT investments that were made under pressure. This is a huge challenge in and of itself, with the added complexity of embracing hybrid work ...
After a year of unprecedented challenges and change, tech pros responding to this year’s survey, IT Pro Day 2021 survey: Bring IT On from SolarWinds, report a positive perception of their roles and say they look forward to what lies ahead ...
One of the key performance indicators for IT Ops is MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Resolution). MTTR essentially measures the length of your incident management lifecycle: from detection; through assignment, triage and investigation; to remediation and resolution. IT Ops teams strive to shorten their incident management lifecycle and lower their MTTR, to meet their SLAs and maintain healthy infrastructures and services. But that's often easier said than done, with incident triage being a key factor in that challenge ...
Achieve more with less. How many of you feel that pressure — or, even worse, hear those words — trickle down from leadership? The reality is that overworked and under-resourced IT departments will only lead to chronic errors, missed deadlines and service assurance failures. After all, we're only human. So what are overburdened IT departments to do? Reduce the human factor. In a word: automate ...
On average, data innovators release twice as many products and increase employee productivity at double the rate of organizations with less mature data strategies, according to the State of Data Innovation report from Splunk ...
While 90% of respondents believe observability is important and strategic to their business — and 94% believe it to be strategic to their role — just 26% noted mature observability practices within their business, according to the 2021 Observability Forecast ...
Let's explore a few of the most prominent app success indicators and how app engineers can shift their development strategy to better meet the needs of today's app users ...
Business enterprises aiming at digital transformation or IT companies developing new software applications face challenges in developing eye-catching, robust, fast-loading, mobile-friendly, content-rich, and user-friendly software. However, with increased pressure to reduce costs and save time, business enterprises often give a short shrift to performance testing services ...
DevOps, SRE and other operations teams use observability solutions with AIOps to ingest and normalize data to get visibility into tech stacks from a centralized system, reduce noise and understand the data's context for quicker mean time to recovery (MTTR). With AI using these processes to produce actionable insights, teams are free to spend more time innovating and providing superior service assurance. Let's explore AI's role in ingestion and normalization, and then dive into correlation and deduplication too ...
