While IT service management (ITSM) has too often been viewed by the industry as an area of reactive management with fading process efficiencies and legacy concerns, a new study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) reveals that, in many organizations, ITSM is becoming a hub of innovation. ITSM is shown to unify IT across its many silos, promote and measure IT operational efficiencies, and consolidate insights critical for IT-to-business planning. This evolution, however, is not without its obstacles and challenges, nor is it taking place in all IT organizations.
In this report titled Next-Generation IT Service Management: Changing the Future of IT, ITSM is examined from various perspectives, including organizational role of respondents, company size and vertical, geographical differences, and success-related patterns of behavior.
The catalytic role of ITSM teams both across IT, and in support of enterprise efficiencies, is still largely misunderstood by many in the industry. This research spotlights ITSM team centricity in everything from IT asset management and enterprise process automation, to increasing support for agile and DevOps initiatives, integrated IT operations, and being a center for IT governance overall — just to name a few examples. This extended outreach means reassessing ITSM in terms of relevant stakeholders, processes, best practices and needed technologies, all of which is examined in our report.
A few of the key data points from the survey are:
■ Most respondents (89 percent) came from central IT ITSM versus line of business (LOB)–centric ITSM. ITSM teams were evenly divided between those with a single service desk and those with multiple service desks.
■ 83 percent of organizations were managing ITSM and customer service desks as a single group.
■ Only 31 percent of respondents indicated using ITIL, but of those, the majority saw it as growing in importance.
■ The two leading strategic priorities were
- Improving end-user experience (internal to the business)
- Integrated support for security/fraud
