What Is the Future of IT Service Management?
Imagine 1.5 wasted work days every week – just from inefficient technology. Shockingly, this is the reality for many employees across the UK where organisations are still struggling to effectively automate their IT Service Management (ITSM) workflows.
ITSM is no longer about just keeping the lights on. It’s a critical piece of your organisation, helping you improve efficiency, customer satisfaction and security across your infrastructure. If you consider that 30% of 3 in 5 roles have the potential to be automated, you’ll see just a little of the potential of effective ITSM to help you build a sustainable organisation with employees working on higher-value and more meaningful tasks.
What is the future of IT service management? Let’s explore six IT service management trends that are shaping the future of business.
1. Automating Manual Processes
Automation offers huge potential to organisations, with Gartner predicting that 70% will use structured automation to improve efficiency in 2025. In ITSM, manual processes can be tedious and costly for your organisation. Not only do they keep your IT teams busy with short-term fixes over strategic projects, they also significantly increase the risk of human error.
As IT experts for the public and private sector, we’ve observed firsthand how automating workflows can dramatically reduce the operational burden on teams. Here are just a few of the time-draining tasks that can be intelligently automated:
- Employee off-boarding
- Incident routing
- Multi-department approvals
- Category-based ticket assignment
2. AI for IT service desks
In 2023, 59% of organisations experienced revenue growth from implementing AI-assisted tools. Likewise, artificial intelligence is transforming service desks. Using AI for IT service desks can help you:
- Route incidents intelligently
- Resolve issues more quickly
- Deliver streamlined workflows for technicians
- Save time and reduce errors
- Offer up quick, informed actions to your team
Consider that 7 in 8 Technology Infrastructure Research Board members surveyed by Gartner use Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to outsource their IT service desks. Outsourcing to MSPs allows organisations to capitalise on advanced AI capabilities, an improved service quality and reduced costs compared to hiring their own expert teams.
At Net Consulting, we can offer a Managed IT Service Desk to help your organisation speed up repetitive, manual processes with streamlined AI automation, alongside rapid risk detection and improved employee satisfaction through workload monitoring.
3. Omni-channel Integration and Support
The third of our emerging IT service management trends is an increased focus on employee user experience. A high-quality employee experience has been shown to improve business performance by up to 84%. This funnels through to IT, where employees now expect easy, quick and personalised help whenever they experience an issue.
Similar to the support you might offer customers, your people will want to receive support using tools they’re already familiar with, from sending an email to making a call or messaging over platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack.
Going forward, your IT Service Management will need to ensure that different support channels aren’t only available to your staff, but are also fully integrated. For example, if a team member reaches out via Teams, Slack, email or phone, they should be able to expect the same fast, high-quality experience. This is where AI for IT service desks comes back in, making sure requests are routed quickly and to the right place, saving everyone time.
By offering the same seamless user experience to employees as you would for customers, you can dramatically improve how your employees feel about their IT support. Minimising time spent on IT issues will importantly free up valuable time for your people to be more productive and do meaningful work, also helping you retain talent.
4. Adopting a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
At Net Consulting, we’ll refer to Configuration Management Databases as the ‘holy grail’ in ITSM. Here are five ways adopting a CMDB can empower your organisation:
- A centralised understanding of organisational assets
- Clearly mapped relationships between hardware and software
- Oversight of dependencies and vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure
An estimated 70% of organisations that use ITSM tools will also adopt CMDBs, according to Gartner’s 2024 report. By using agentless discovery, you can quickly gain a comprehensive picture of your organisation’s IT, both on-premise and cloud-based. This makes it easier for your IT teams to work strategically, detect risks early and proactively respond to any incidents.
5. Managed Digital Integration
Unfortunately, data silos in IT are still an insidious problem for organisations, experienced by 3 in 4 IT and security professionals. This can cause problems with reduced productivity and slower security response times.
The future of IT Service Management will see more organisations using APIs and managed digital integrations to bridge traditional gaps and make way for seamless sharing and automation across applications. According to McKinsey, managed digital integration can increase an organisation’s productivity by up to 40%, dramatically accelerating service delivery and innovation.
Strategic API integration allows your teams to free up time from repetitive manual tasks, reduce human error and spend more time instead on the projects that add value to your organisation.
6. Service Management Architecture
It’s predicted that, by 2027, the sustainability of an IT system will become a performance metric for 80% of CIOs. Beyond technology, effective IT service management needs high-quality architecture.
The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®) sets out the best practices for ITSM architecture and can be used to assess your current and future operations. This approach allows you to ensure your ITSM aligns with your business objectives, delivering clear, measurable outcomes.
According to Forrester, organisations that implement cohesive service management architecture can expect a 30% improvement in service delivery speed and a 20% reduction in operational costs. By clearly defining your roadmaps, setting out efficient processes and integrating your data streams, you can set a solid foundation for your organisation’s ITSM now, and in the future.
How We Can Help
Finally, what Is the Future of IT Service Management? We hope we’ve convinced you that the future of ITSM focuses on serving your people and organisation strategically, powered by automation and AI.
When you’re ready to upgrade your ITSM, we can help you at each stage, from conducting an initial audit to achieving a CMDB and managing your digital integration. View our IT service management services here or get in touch to book a demo for your organisation.
