5 ways to become an effective enabler of IT service management

The business needs of IT Service Management (ITSM) are evolving, and I&O leaders must take sufficient action to position their ITSM practices as an enabler of digital business instead of a bottleneck.

A recent Gartner report on the 2022 Strategic Roadmap For IT Service Management states, “By 2024, 80% of ITSM teams that have not adopted an agile approach will find that their ITSM practices are ignored or bypassed.”

Another key finding from the report states that many ITSM teams find their ways of working incompatible with the agile methods of DevOps and product teams. And overreliance on introspective operational metrics — rather than user experience (UX), productivity measures, and business outcomes — is hampering innovative improvement initiatives.

With so much riding on the positioning of ITSM to support the digital workplace and evolve the IT service delivery, I&O leaders must ramp up their efforts to achieve the optimal vision for ITSM.

Riding on the insights from the 2022 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management report by Gartner, here are the five factors that I&O leaders must address to be effective enablers of ITSM within the enterprise:

1. Federate ITSM practices to allow product teams to deliver effective services

Ensuring effectiveness across the environment requires a focus on enabling the product teams to deliver the necessary service levels. One way to achieve this is by instantiating the agile service delivery office (ASDO). This ITSM center of excellence will work closely with the product and platform team to ensure that the product teams are independent and deliver a high quality of service. The principal responsibility is to provide a supporting framework to both the product and the traditional ITSM teams supporting the waterfall-based environment.

2. Embrace digital employee experiences

I&O’s embrace of digital employee experience management (DEX) drives deeper engagement with the consumers of IT’s services to ensure that these services are delivered to meet the needs of the various supported personas consistently. To accomplish this, service management functions must evolve traditional continual service improvement approaches to put processes and technologies in place to listen to employees, monitor performance, and deliver new or enhanced experiences based on applying that information.

3. Leverage metrics to measure IT service experiences

Service experience metrics take a business-centric approach to metrics design instead of the traditional IT-centric approach adopted by I&O leaders for many years. SXM will assist I&O leaders in identifying impediments to the service experience.

4. Reorganize IT service desks as hubs for swarming and lean workflows

To satisfy the demand for more immediate responses to support critical business services and evolving products, I&O leaders face increasing pressure to diagnose and resolve incidents more quickly. IT service desks will be working alongside IT and business departments, utilizing agile approaches that require rapid and lean support workflows. Remote and hybrid working have accelerated these trends, highlighting the increasing unsuitability of the classic tiered structure to IT support.

5. Permeate ITSM tools and practices with AITSM

As demands on I&O organizations grow, I&O leaders are seeking opportunities to automate and provide more proactive management of their environments. AITSM refers to the application of context, advice, actions, and interfaces of AI, automation, and big data on ITSM tools and optimized practices to improve the overall effectiveness, efficiency, and error reduction for I&O staff.

Final thoughts

This is just the tip of the iceberg that lays out the foundation to be an effective enabler of ITSM within all business units of your enterprise. Gartner’s 2022 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management report outlines the five visions of the optimal future state and the current state of those same topics. A gap analysis assessment follows these, and finally, a migration plan featuring recommendations for I&O leaders to migrate the gap from current to future state. Get your copy of Gartner’s 2022 strategic roadmap here and see for yourself.