Hello Readers! Welcome to the first of many thought provoking, industry insightful blogs for the year! And what better way to start the year than to do it around the upcoming trends in ITSM? This will become an annual blog where we will look into our crystal ball and predict what we think are the hot topics in ITSM for the new year and beyond.
Are you ready to find out more? Our top 5 exciting trends for 2020 are…
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Transforming the Employee Experience – Becoming a ‘People-Centric’ Business
Employees are now expecting a better user experience when interacting with IT; they want it to be simpler and easier to use. Therefore, organisations must enable their employees to do their job better and faster. For ITSM, this means that IT needs to provide the tools, hardware and software to enable employees to perform their role as efficiently as possible. Organisations want their employees to become more productive but for this to happen IT must be an enabler. It needs to be faster, easier and dependable. It’s simple really – “Do more for your employees and they will do more for you!”
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Move from IT Service Management to Enterprise Service Management
ITSM tool providers are becoming more generic about how their tools can be utilised to deliver Enterprise Service Management. Around 5 years ago, ITSM tools were marketed as being ITIL aligned. With the move towards Enterprise Service Management, ITSM tools are now less aligned to ITIL with the ITIL concepts being applied in organisations to deliver Enterprise Service Management. With this move, common business terms will start to evolve. IT refers to the “Incident” whereas HR refers to the “Case”. It will be interesting to see how these common business terms evolve as organisations change. What’s in a name you might ask?!
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Advanced Automation and AI Organisations – Pushing the Boundaries with New Technology
AI has been a buzzword in IT and ITSM for a while, but AI now needs to deliver an outcome. The combination of AI and advanced automation will become more prevalent in ITSM. If you think of a simple, yet very effective use case, a user can request software for their device through a conversational chat bot with the fulfilment delivered via automation. You start to see powerful use cases where AI and automation combine.
The use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the delivery of ITSM will become standard for organisations that need to push boundaries. RPA will become the digital assistant and form part of the ever-expanding Omni channel support models we see today. The possibilities for RPA in ITSM are endless but like everything, organisations will need to walk before they can run. Getting the foundations in place in 2020 will happen and more use cases will be delivered via advanced automation. Having an effective automation strategy will become more important as it allows organisations to become more agile and deliver new services that achieve business outcomes quicker. This also aligns to ITIL v4 which is very focussed on value and value creation.
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IT Service Providers – Deliver More for Less
Requirements for IT service providers are getting harder, their contractual requirements are getting harder, therefore, the trend is they will need to deliver more for less. There will be an increase in automation tools and more effective use of RPA. All this falls back into the theme of the employee wanting a better IT experience. The legal teams and the commercial teams will take their business’s requirements to the IT service providers and tell them to do more. We predict that’s going to be a continued trend.
The key users of automation tools such as RPA will be the large systems integrators who deliver big IT service contracts. There is continued pressure from the commercial teams of these companies asking for more and, often, they are equipped with the knowledge of what can be done. Now the IT service providers need to deliver!
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ITSM Tools – Organisations are Taking Back Control
This is something that really started around 2018, but we feel it is something that will continue in 2020 as organisations strive to deliver greater value.
Historically, some organisations were happy to accept the tooling that came in a box from the IT service provider. With the move towards service integration and management and multi-vendor supply chain, organisations needed to have their own service management tooling. This has led to IT service providers no longer delivering the ITSM tools even though they are the largest consumer of the tool. This has an interesting dynamic of the organisation owning the licenses with the service providers either consuming their customer’s tool or integrating into it. Both have pros and cons, but the main driver is to allow organisations have a ‘plug and play’ approach to service providers. Organisations are saying we will buy the tools and you can use them, but we have full control. This allows organisations to align the ITSM tools to their needs and not be hamstrung by using the IT service providers tools. Like anything, this can lead to challenges, but we are seeing organisations take greater control of their ITSM tooling and this will continue in 2020.
Finally, the one thing we are super confident about is “IT of tomorrow is about saying yes you can” so you better be ready!
Mark Twomey
Director, Xcession
