The Future of IT Service Management: AI-Powered, Proactive, and Business-Aligned
In the ever-evolving business landscape, where IT Service Management (ITSM) is one of the prerequisites of competitive advantage, IT managers and C-Suite are currently struggling to manage their businesses’ IT infrastructure to deliver quality services.
Leveraging largely on traditional ITSM in the rapidly progressing business world takes a toll on IT operation teams’ efforts to boost the overall productivity of businesses. Moreover, they grapple with pain points such as AI strategy, data and analytics strategy, new security threats, demonstrating IT’s value and talent strategy.
According to a poll conducted by Gartner, it was found that 92% of the CIOs deemed AI as the most vital component of next-generation ITSM and plan to incorporate AI-powered ITSM in their business infrastructure by 2025.
Why is AI-powered ITSM more advantageous over traditional ITSM in the current scenario? Read on to learn how AI-integrated ITSM can take your business to the next level.
What is IT Service Management?
ITSM is a system maintained by the IT teams for managing the IT services of a business. It is a strategic move that covers all aspects of IT services such as designing, developing, delivering, managing and optimizing the IT services to address the needs of the customers, employees and business. Interestingly, the Global ITSM market size is anticipated to reach USD 37.75 billion by 2032.
The ITSM structure places, ‘IT as a service’ as its key idea and there are various frameworks of ITSM that ensure standardized protocols for ITSM to augment the efficiency of IT services it offers. Some of the best exemplars of ITSM frameworks include ITSM, ITIL, DevOps, COBIT, SIAM, IT4IT, and lean.
However, traditional ITSM lags in matching the demands of the changing needs of modern businesses, especially about speed, agility and operational efficiency.
Challenges to ITSM
The top challenges for the C-Suites related to traditional ITSM are legacy technology, disparate and multiple security tools, GDPR and compliance, multiple vendors, scalability, technology evolution, resource constraints, change management, operational resilience and project management and deployment.
IT professionals including IT operations managers, service desk managers, business managers, and business process owners also address various challenges related to aligning the IT services of the business with the perpetually advancing needs of the business.
The traditional ITSM tools cannot assist the IT professionals beyond a limit in resolving all these pain points including management of service requests from aligning the IT strategy with business objectives.
1. Silos
In a siloed structure, the IT systems and departments cannot effectively communicate and collaborate. This leads to a lack of alignment between the IT services and the overall goals of the businesses
2. Resistance to change
When employees resist learning new skills and tools to integrate change into the existing ITSM system, it may reflect as delayed services, and impact the agility of service
3. Delayed responses
Traditional ITSM lacks automation and most of the processes require manual approval and attention. Moreover, it is a system that works with ticket management and service request management. Such a system that operates on various layers of escalation and approval results in delayed responses to the service request resulting in compromised operational efficiency.
4. Rigidity of ITSM frameworks
Traditional ITSM frameworks are rigid which leads to inflexible processes that lack adaptability to the rapid and dynamic needs of the business.
5. Inefficiency in managing multi-cloud and hybrid environments
Traditional ITSMs are inefficacious in managing multi-cloud and hybrid environments as the system lacks integrated services and automated workflows.
6. Reactive monitoring and lack of automation
Traditional ITSM offers reactive monitoring where an issue is addressed when it is reported and is dependent upon manual intervention to fulfill tasks such as service request fulfillment and change management. Therefore, the system fails to offer predictability to prevent issues that hinder user experience.
7. Inability to support agile and DevOps systems
Traditional ITSM practices cannot cope with the requirements of agile and DevOps systems that undergo rapid transformation to support continuous delivery and repetitive changes.
The impact of outdated ITSM practices on businesses
1. Increased downtime and service disruptions
ITSM practices devoid of agile systems fail to offer quick responses to operational halts and result in increased downtimes and service disruptions. The outdated ITSM can thus reduce revenue generation and impact customer trust.
2. Reduced productivity and increased operational costs
Lack of automation in traditional ITSM systems demands for IT professionals to do iterative tasks that are time-consuming which in turn results in reduced productivity and delays in responses. Operational costs related to hiring more staff to handle tickets are also additional costs that can be avoided by automating service management.
3. Increased security issues
Traditional ITSM systems may lack security features to protect against modern threats and can lead to data breaches, compliance issues and spoiled reputation.
4. Poor customer experience
Traditional ITSM that offers slow responses, compromised service quality and increased system downtime can have an adverse effect on customer experience.
5. Ineffective problem resolution and missed insights
Traditional ITSM lacks proactive problem-solving and analytics capabilities. Therefore, the ITSM fails to gather insights about system performance, incidents and customer satisfaction. Lack of insights also prevents businesses from making informed decisions and forecasting and avoiding potential issues.
How does AI-powered ITSM create business value?
AI-integrated ITSM offers a proactive and business-aligned IT service management that can address many of the challenges currently faced by the traditional ITSM system.
1. Automated ticket resolution and follow-ups
AI-powered ITSM platforms can produce insights from historical data using predictive analytics, detect patterns in ticket submissions and predict recurring issues such as hardware degradation. This system can also offer automatic solutions leading to faster and more accurate ticket resolution systems.
Generative AI spurs up 40 to 50% of IT upgradation and also reduces technology debt by up to 40%.
AI-assisted ticket classification fosters seamless ticket management. Machine learning enables the system to analyze the ticket automatically and streamlines the process by assigning the tickets to the appropriate departments.
This system also helps businesses to process a large number of tickets concurrently. AI-integrated ITSM also ensures that tickets are addressed on the grounds of emergency and maintains better service quality by reducing response times and errors.
2. Smart email responses and effective communication
Responding to a heap of support emails may be an exhausting task for the IT service teams. AI-powered ITSM can aid in smart or intelligent response systems where the system can generate accurate responses to the customers. AI-powered ITSMs are capable of analyzing texts using Natural language processing or NLP. This also facilitates decreased workload and faster responsiveness.
3. Better service desk operations and customer support
AI-powered ITSM facilitates effective service desk operations with the help of chatbots and virtual assistants. These AI-driven personalities can chat with the customers to understand customer requests and offer solutions to the customers by reducing the workload of the support staff.
4. Insights and analytics
AI-powered ITSM systems are capable of analyzing datasets to offer insights that can be considered to make informed decisions regarding the IT services of the business. Businesses can gather insights regarding current trends, potential issues and suggestive measures to prevent risks with the help of AI-integrated ITSM which can be utilized to deliver better services.
5. Minimised manual errors
Manual intervention in traditional ITSM can lead to mistakes such as misconfiguration or incorrect ticket categorization. On the other hand, AI-integrated ITSM can reduce these errors by streamlining the automation of repetitive and complex tasks ensuring more accuracy.
Examples of IT solutions providers offering AI-powered ITSM tools
· Flexera, the software company offers AI-powered IT solutions to businesses that focus on data cleaning. The company’s Cloud-based ITAM and FinOps solution, Flexera One, offers AI-assisted hybrid IT environment management.
· ServiceNow offers AI-embedded IT solutions that are purpose-built which also enables seamless operations and ensures data security.
· Rezolve.ai leverages the power of Generative AI and helps businesses to auto-deflect 25–35% of tickets thereby boosting productivity.
Conclusion
Traditional ITSM frameworks are no longer up to par to satisfy the requirements of modern business. Businesses may fall behind the curve when they refrain from integrating AI into their ITSM as traditional ITSM cannot provide solutions to the increasingly complex requirements of the businesses.
AI-powered ITSM is the need of the hour as it can meet agile requirements and align operations with business goals. Furthermore, leveraging AI can also help businesses in the proactive management of IT incidents.
Integrating AI into ITSM not only augments the internal processes of any business but also helps IT managers and CIOs to drive success to the business and to position their business with increased speed, agility and efficiency.
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