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Most ITSM Teams Are Slated for Growth

new research reveals that ITSM is becoming a hub of innovation
Dennis Drogseth

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

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Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

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In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

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Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Most ITSM Teams Are Slated for Growth

new research reveals that ITSM is becoming a hub of innovation
Dennis Drogseth

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

Hot Topics

The Latest

Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...