Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Data will always be unclean. It's just a matter of degree. I internalized that on day one of my master's program in data science, when a professor warned us that roughly 80% of our time would go to preprocessing and cleaning, not building models. Years later, as Principal Product Manager for AI, ML and Analytics at Ivanti, I've found the guidance holds up remarkably well in practice.

Las Vegas, May 2026 — Almaden took part in the 2026 edition of HDI Service & Support World, held May 3–7 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. From Booth 109, the company had a clear mission: to show how Collective IQ, its Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform, amplifies the value of IT service management without added complexity, disruption, or wasted time. Visitors to the booth had the opportunity to speak directly with experts, Dave Wagner and Bob Kruger (Chief Product Officer).

Have you tried using AI at work and felt it works well for small tasks, but not beyond that? It can handle simple things like creating a summary, writing a draft, or answering a question. This works because the task is clear. But most tasks are not that simple. They involve multiple steps. One step depends on another. Data comes from different systems, and some decisions need checks before moving ahead. This is where a single AI system starts to struggle.

Are your AI systems giving answers your teams cannot trust? Most enterprises deploy LLMs expecting reliable outputs, but the results often feel inconsistent or incomplete. The problem is the missing structure behind it. Enterprise data is usually fragmented across multiple systems, teams, and tools. Your AI does not understand how customers, products, policies, and operations connect. Without that context, it fills gaps with assumptions, which leads to unreliable results.

The employee digital experience (DEX) is no longer just a concept; it has become a concrete discipline supported by specialized tools. At the center of this transformation is Collective IQ, Almaden’s DEX solution, available in the Essential and Business editions. The Business edition includes AlmaAI a family of generative AI capabilities that take IT management to a new level.

Over the years, InvGate Asset Management has helped organizations build structured, reliable IT inventories, creating the visibility and control required for effective IT Asset Management. That maturity is critical, but visibility alone does not eliminate one of the biggest operational burdens IT teams still face: constant manual work. Atlas was designed to address this gap.

InvGate Asset Management has launched CMDB Auto-Mapping, a new feature that modernizes the way teams create and maintain a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This capability detects the most critical asset relationships and recommends connections that users can quickly accept or reject. The result is less manual work, stronger governance, and a step closer to a true System of Intelligence, where visibility naturally leads to better decisions, faster assessments, and more reliable operations.

When an incident occurs, an L2/3 engineer or SRE can spend 20–30 minutes investigating across alert consoles, combing through change records, and pinging teams on Slack or Microsoft Teams. When you multiply that time spent across thousands of incidents per year by the cost of an IT outage at $14,056 per minute, the cost is staggering. Enterprises can’t afford to waste time searching across disparate tools.