Many IT service management (ITSM) technologies are out-of-date, having been designed before self-service, automation, and contemporary architectures were commonplace. The situation has been exacerbated by remote employment and other constraints.
New AI-based features will lower labor expenses and minimize the need for them.
According to him, the pandemic has increased the need of adopting solutions that can minimize the amount of manpower necessary in labor-intensive IT service and support.
ITSM ticket numbers have increased by around 35% in the last year, which is unprecedented. Annual ticket volume has historically increased by 3% to 5% every year. The epidemic was to blame for the surge, but there was no matching increase in staff, according to Rumburg.
The challenge is: how do businesses handle increased workloads while maintaining a fixed headcount? That’s where technology and tools, particularly AI technologies, come in, he added.
He claimed that they become smarter with time. They intelligently routed tickets. They participated in automated issue management, which entailed identifying the fundamental causes of problems that were driving incident volume and, as a result, reducing the number of incidents over time.
According to Rumburg, some companies reported savings in the total cost of ownership of up to 50%; decreases in ticket volumes of up to 50%; improvements in first-contact and first-level resolution rate; improvements in staff experience; and improvements in customer experience.
These AIOps solutions, he noted, are critical for controlling workloads in the post-pandemic context. As they get smarter, they will gradually supplant human resources working in IT service and support, as well as ITSM in general.
Organizations will increase their self-service options.
According to Marcel Shaw, advising solution consultant for federal healthcare at ServiceNow, both commercial and public-sector enterprises are quickly expanding their self-service capabilities beyond traditional IT services in 2021.
He believes that the importance of IT Support for business is very high and self-service solutions will change over the next year due to the increased need for non-IT services. Currently, federal government agencies are taking active steps to improve human resource services, update knowledge and training capabilities, and deliver vaccination management services to workers and residents by utilizing typical ITSM self-service portals.
Many enterprises, especially government agencies, will use AI in their ITSM systems to handle growing self-service workloads while reducing costs and boosting customer satisfaction, according to Shaw. Chatbots and virtual agents, for example, will benefit from better natural-language characteristics, he added.
More automation is on the way.
The primary trend this year, according to David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting, will be the automation of ITSM. This will most likely be observed in a few big additions, such as knowledge bases that can not only contain information on common issues and remedies but also engage an ML system to help desks detect issues and automate the contact with users, he added.
Automation in ITSM is the No. 3 hottest trend in 2021, according to a poll by ITSM.tools. Automation has various advantages, including minimizing human error and speeding up workflows, all of which help IT support personnel and their clients have a better experience. Automating complicated activities, for example, can speed up the onboarding of new service desk workers, according to Mann.
Traditional ITSM will be infiltrated by advanced analytics.
According to Charles Betz, principal analyst at Forrester Research, advanced analytics will continue to pervade all parts of conventional ITSM, including incident, issue, change, release, and request.
According to Forrester’s evaluation study, only providers with robust, applied analytics, such as employing machine learning to rate change risk, would obtain the highest ranks in the future, he added.
Business analytics and data analysis from numerous sources are two ITSM tool trends, according to Timothy Colwell, executive vice president of the Association of Telecom, Mobility, and IT Management Professionals (AOTMP). “As a result, adding visualization overlays to be able to evaluate data to forecast and plan will be in full swing.”
According to him, data mining and analytics across all IT and business systems increase overall delivery efficiency and allow IT, practitioners, to identify opportunities to align with and support business objectives.
Which trends should you put your money into?
Depending on your organization’s goals, some of these trends, such as AI-based features, automation, sophisticated analytics, and extended self-service capabilities, may have a potential ROI worth exploring. Some of these functions may already be featured in the tools your team already uses. Experts suggest that ensuring you’re utilizing any new features in what you already have is a solid first step toward keeping up with the trends.
