IT teams, specifically ITSM practitioners, are confronting several monumental challenges in this decade. Chief among these are reduced IT budgets, the proliferation of cyberattacks and inconsistent service experiences.
The ITSM industry has been discussing AI, specifically the scope for automation, demonstration of value and ESM for quite some time now. However, conversations regarding these trends were primarily discussed in silos. In 2024 and beyond, ITSM teams will have the opportunity to leverage a combination of approaches to tackle these challenges.
GenAI and Hyper-Automation will Help Balance Narrowing Budgets and Soaring Expectations
The ebb and flow of economic undercurrents has prompted IT leadership around the globe to tighten their purse strings. It also doesn’t help that the traditional “cost center” misconception of IT continues. Meanwhile, employee expectations are substantially higher than in previous years.
Against this backdrop, IT teams will leverage a combination of GenAI and hyper-automation to execute these soaring expectations but within budgets. This can be achieved through:
- The low-hanging fruit in GenAI: IT technicians can offload redundant tasks such as emails, notes, searching the KB, incident communications, etc. to GenAI agents. This frees up valuable time that can be used to focus on charting digital strategies for the business.
- Hyper-automating service delivery: While autonomous service delivery has been on the wish list of IT teams for some time now, the hybrid nature of IT infrastructures has been a hurdle. Today, leading ITSM vendors offer deeper workflow automation, RPA, and orchestration capabilities, providing IT teams with myriad avenues to connect across cloud, on-premises and legacy systems, leading to a reduction of manual toil and third-party development efforts.
We can expect trailblazers to position GenAI-powered chatbots as the front end of IT service delivery, which call back to workflow automations in the back end. The productivity gains from these two approaches will more than offset the cost of innovation, leading to better experiences at optimal costs.
An IT-Security Mesh With ITSM as the Connective Tissue
The average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, a 15 percent increase over three years. Threat actors, both internal and external, are turning to more sophisticated attack vectors capable of blindsiding even the most diligent cybersecurity teams.
In today’s connected environment, security incidents can easily be hidden in plain sight, escaping detection from current security incident tooling. To respond to this unique challenge, IT teams will align SecOps tools with ITSM platforms and weave in predictive intelligence and workflow automations to modernize security incident response workflows.
Doing so will help them think beyond reactive responses by enriching the context for the incident responders within the ITSM solution. Real-time integrations with a mesh of cybersecurity tools, including data security monitors and UEBA solutions, will become indispensable. AI weaved into UEBA will help InfoSec teams identify baselines and possible anomalies, which in turn trigger incident response workflows in ITSM solutions.
Organizations will also harness hyper-automation to reduce the gaps between detection of an incident and response to it, buying time for incident commanders to take stock, prepare, and mitigate the incident.
A Definitive Push Toward Truly Unified Service Management
While ESM has been an ongoing trend in recent years, enterprise teams have often delivered very inconsistent service experiences. Most service teams restricted ESM to just adopting the ticketing fundamentals from ITSM.
Over the next decade, organizations will look beyond ticketing to connect workflows that span enterprise departments such as IT, HR, finance, facility and more. Advancements in workflow automation and orchestration will supplement this trend by facilitating the development of unified touchpoints that deliver the same level of employee experiences and significant gains in time to execution. For instance, onboarding or offboarding employees will now be automated with multiple departments operating at different points in a singular workflow, including seamless yet redacted data exchange to align with privacy regulations.
Organizations can begin by piloting smaller experiments with one or two departments before expanding the scope of AI-augmented workflows that connect the enterprise together.
Becoming a digital-first organization is a top priority for every enterprise today. IT teams that leverage the trends discussed in this article will position their organizations for success and gain the digital edge over competitors.
