Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Self-service as a function has become ubiquitous, whether employed to improve customer satisfaction, employee engagement or both. With the slow but sure transition to a hybrid working model, customers (and employees) have begun to demand a better experience when it comes to servicing and issue resolution. According to The Hackett Group 2022 Key Issues Study, self-service automation has seen the most common shift in technology function workload for three years in a row.

According to Gartner, the global cloud ITSM market is expected to grow to over $12 billion by 2025. ITSM now is more important than ever (even more so, after the pandemic), and industry leaders agree. What does this mean for ITSM professionals? This blog details how the ITSM profession evolves and what technical and interpersonal ITSM skills professionals will need to excel in 2022 and beyond.

The Hackett Group’s 2022 Key Issues Study reveals technology’s top 10 priority objectives to help businesses plan their goals and tech investments to accelerate digital transformation in 2022. 2022 will be a year of experimentation and tech adoption for IT leaders and their technology organizations, driven by the pandemic-induced “work from anywhere” models and high penetration of cloud-based applications.

Did you know through 2023, I&O leaders will overspend by $750 million* on buying unused features of ITSM tools? That’s almost $150 million more from $600 million spend in 2019. Despite this steep increase in cost, why do so many I&O leaders continue to overbuy ITSM tools beyond their needs? This isn’t because organizational budgets are running in excess but because most I&O leaders rely exclusively on the Magic Quadrant or ITIL-based RFP templates when selecting their ITSM tool.

System outages are the worst nightmares for IT support teams, but they also provide an opportunity to stand out. During a major service outage, customers are often impacted a lot more because they have much less information about what is happening. Some of the biggest outages that affected users all over the world last year include those of Slack, PlayStation, Airbnb, FedEx, and Amazon.

Eight years back we were inspired to create an employee experience on par with the best customer experience available anywhere. Fast forward to today, we are the only Challenger in the Gartner magic quadrant for ITSM tools, enabling customers to delight their employees with a modern and right-sized service management solution.

Advances in machine learning and NLP have cracked the flood gates open and AI is now emerging as the definitive transformational technology of our times. A recent IDG study found 93% of IT professionals have already deployed or started to explore AI to augment their ITSM and ITOM modernization efforts. Clearly, AI is making its way into our workplaces faster than we imagined.

It’s finally the most wonderful time of the year, and this calls for a blog post on what service desk agents really want for Christmas! In addition to a warm blanket, a holiday watchlist, and a steaming cup of hot cocoa, IT agents could also use these service management functions for an extra merry holiday season. Continue reading to find out what they are.