As organizations increasingly adopt more devices, applications, and other technologies, IT teams addressing problems before they arise is a vital part of avoiding downtime, maintaining productivity, and ultimately growing revenue. While a reactive approach has traditionally been good enough, the most successful organizations are increasingly taking proactive measures to ensure employees always have access to what they need with little or no downtime.

IT help desk support has been a constant need in organizations from small businesses to enterprises. Then, the pandemic spurred an increase in demand for help desk employees, and the tried-and-true tactics and strategies that were previously used to hire in-house help desk employees don’t seem to work as effectively. Recruiting and hiring for these positions has been very difficult in the current candidate-driven market.

When we look at the calls our help desk receives, we see many of the same issues repeatedly. Some of the most common calls help desk agents receive involve issues like password resets, new hardware requests, and generating standard reports. And when we examine our IT environments as a whole over the last decade or so, there has been a huge emphasis on automation. Why? We have learned that automation reduces risk, streamlines workflows, and makes everyone more productive.

Uncertain times are often a catalyst for important innovations. During the Great Depression, for example, inventors created nylon, magnetic tape recording, and the first working helicopter—all of which are still in use today. To be prepared for the future, you need to take stock of where you’ve been, what you’ve accomplished, and where you want to go. Let’s look at four tech trends that are resonating with ServiceNow customers.

Recently, a top consulting firm’s VP, of IT Operations, managing 80K endpoints asked: “What shall we do to Drive down the Service Desk cost by 30%?” This doesn’t come as a surprise. In fact, we’ve been hearing this question from many IT teams lately, across all industries. EUC managers know that reducing Service Desk costs will directly impact employee satisfaction and result in an increase in escalations.

Professional services automation can play a pivotal role in the delivery of services. It is a technology platform that enables organizations to streamline and automate all areas of their professional services operations, including project management, customer support, billing and invoicing, resource management, and reporting.

Recruiting potential job candidates is a huge challenge that IT companies are facing right now. With the tech unemployment rate down to 1.7%, hiring is extremely tough and competitive. Splashtop’s 2022 State of Remote Support Market Trends Report found that 94% of responding organizations have dealt with difficulty in hiring, retention, and skill shortages this past year. What’s more, two-thirds of help desk teams are feeling stressed and burned out.

The traditional wall between IT operations and IT services—along with tedious, antiquated processes for resolving IT issues—is harmful to a company’s productivity. It’s also soul-sucking for team members. Those conditions hinder data sharing and collaboration. As a result, IT staffers must spend hours on cumbersome tasks rather than focusing on meaningful, strategic projects that make them look forward to their workdays.

Nearly every business leader these days is focused on achieving value—and for good reason. Business leaders are accountable for ensuring all the work they do delivers the most value possible to the business. Some have adopted Agile methodologies to achieve this. For Agile methodologies to be effective, you need to measure the right things. And to measure the right things, you need the right data producing the right information to provide you with the right insights. Agile value metrics can help.