Why Your Current ITSM Tool Might No Longer Be Enough
The IT service management (ITSM) industry has long suffered from ITSM tool churn, often because ITSM tool customers fail to receive the value they expected (and were perhaps “sold”). The root causes of this dissatisfaction are varied but often related to people and processes rather than the technology, with the inability to make the technology work how they need it to the unwanted outcome.
However, missing capabilities have become an increasingly prominent reason for ITSM tool change* in recent years. It started with the need for enterprise service management enablement, perhaps to support digital transformation. But now, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities, or their absence, are the latest reason why the current ITSM tool’s capabilities might no longer be enough.
This blog looks at how the availability of AI-enabled capabilities has changed the table stakes for ITSM tools and what customers should look for in their next ITSM tool.
This @Joe_the_IT_Guy blog looks at how the availability of AI-enabled capabilities has changed the table stakes for #ITSM tools & what customers should look for in their next ITSM tool. Share on XA brief history of ITSM tools
What IT organizations expect from their ITSM tools has evolved over the years. What started as the need for an IT help desk ticketing system became an ITSM tool that enabled the core service management processes such as incident management, service request management, problem management, and change management through workflow automation. Knowledge management capabilities were then added to facilitate these ITSM processes.
Service catalog and self-service portal capabilities became table stakes in the late noughties. ITSM tool capabilities were then somewhat stable until the 2020s when, in part thanks to the global pandemic, enterprise service management needs came to the fore to support organizations and their digital transformation initiatives (even though the enterprise service management approach was over a decade older).
These two changes have prompted ITSM tool churn in the last decade. However, the addition of AI-enabled ITSM capabilities to ITSM tools is now driving a new wealth of opportunities, with Copilot availability and success again leaving organizations wondering whether their current ITSM tool is still good enough relative to other options in the market.
Copilots are more than a new technology option
While your corporate ITSM tool might offer capabilities related to the core ITIL practices, the big question is whether these are overly manual (in the context of Copilot capabilities) and miss the opportunity for “better, faster, cheaper” IT operations and business outcomes. They might also limit your IT organization’s ability to scale for both organizational and technology-adoption growth.
'Copilots are more than just a new technology option' - @Joe_the_IT_Guy #AI #Automation #ITSM Share on XSo, have you stopped to think about the available AI-related capabilities, including generative AI (GenAI) capabilities, in the context of your ITSM tool’s ability to meet current and future IT and business needs? The latter of these is twofold. First, in terms of delivering IT service and support in line with increasing business expectations. Second, in relation to sharing ITSM capabilities with other business functions as part of enterprise service management or digital transformation strategies.
But understand the difference between AI and GenAI Copilot use
When considering the available AI-related capabilities, it’s crucial to appreciate the difference that GenAI Copilots make to ITSM tool capabilities versus traditional AI use. For example:
- Quicker time to value – it’s quick to deploy, there’s rapid adoption, and customer business outcomes are realized more swiftly
- Ease of use – the user experience is intuitive and easy to navigate
- Capabilities are embedded – such that the answers given by Copilots (for end-users and agents) leverage ITSM tool data, for example, related to assets also managed on the service management platform.
How Copilots help service management
A good way to explain the power of Copilots is through examples of IT support use cases; these include:
- Intelligent workflow automation. For IT service desks, Copilots can automatically classify, prioritize, and route incident and request tickets using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. This saves time and money, improves triage accuracy, and delivers better end-user experiences.
- Chatbots. Copilot-powered chatbots can handle repetitive end-user needs using a conversational approach that lets people quickly get the resolutions they need. A chatbot capability is available 24×7, allowing end-users to get the assistance they need wherever and whenever they require it.
- Real-time service personnel assistance. Copilots can augment IT service desk agents’ knowledge, skills, and experience. They offer real-time suggestions and actions to the service desk agents to help with ticket resolution speed and effectiveness.
- Intelligent swarming – the GenAI identifies experts to work collaboratively on incidents and problems based on their skill, experience, and availability.
- Automated case clustering – exposing new insights within the ITSM platform using cluster analysis. For example, similar incidents can be correlated, and recommendations can be provided to resolve similar issues or invoke problem-management capabilities.
- Intelligent escalation – AI predicts whether incidents or requests will likely breach their service level agreement (SLA) target and escalates them to appropriate personnel for rapid resolution.
- Process optimization – the automated process mining of ITSM processes to identify and address bottlenecks and waste.
- Automated endpoint anomaly response – tracking endpoint diagnostics to identify and address end-user device issues.
- Writing assistance (including ticket summarization). Copilots can create ticket summaries that facilitate understanding, draft knowledge articles, and compose email responses and other messages for IT service desk agents.
- Automated performance reporting and insights. Copilots can provide regular automated updates to IT support staff on team and individual performance relative to agreed targets. They offer other analytical capabilities, too – for example, predictions of future performance and improvement recommendations.
What this change means for ITSM tools (and their owners)
Over a decade ago, I heard the phrase “It’s not your grandparents’ ITSM tool” used to describe the changes hitting the ITSM tool market back then. This was both funny and insightful at the time. However, the advent of Copilots for ITSM makes the phrase more relevant than ever for ITSM tools.
Simply offering (and buying) traditional ITSM tool capabilities that align with core ITIL practices is no longer enough. Both IT organizations and their parent businesses need more to be successful.
ITSM tools need the new Copilot-powered capabilities that help deliver the aforementioned “better, faster, cheaper” IT operations and business outcomes. If their ITSM tool doesn’t offer them, an organization is losing out on the productivity, cost, and service quality advantages received by organizations already invested in ITSM tools with the latest service management enablement. It’s a significant difference that will only become more important as Copilot capabilities and the ITSM use cases increase.
It’s time to question whether your current ITSM tool and its capabilities are still enough for your ITSM practices to meet IT and business needs.
*You can view the ITSM.tools research on Why Organizations Are Still Changing Their ITSM Tools here.
