IT service management (ITSM) is a critical corporate capability, but what are the key ITSM trends to watch out for in 2023? Thanks to the general evolution of technology-enabled businesses and the digital transformation acceleration caused by the global pandemic, the suitability of your organization’s current ITSM capabilities needs to be questioned – especially in light of the ten ITSM trends we’re about to share.
We consulted ten IT leaders to reflect on the road ahead. Here are their answers on service management’s “reason for being,” the exploitation of artificial intelligence, the focus on sustainability, the suitability of the corporate ITSM solution, and more.
Keep reading to learn more about how and where your organization’s ITSM capabilities might need to change in 2023.
Top 10 ITSM trends to watch out for in 2023
It’s always good to be aware of ITSM industry trends; some are usually well-known (having been ITSM trends for a good few years), while others are newer and might not yet be on your organization’s ITSM improvement radar.
To help, we asked ten ITSM industry authorities to contribute their views and guidance on the key ITSM trends that organizations should focus on in 2023.
ITSM trend #1: Employee-centric IT, with employee experience as a change driver
You’ve probably seen an ITSM presentation at a conference that talks about service management moving IT organizations from being technology-centric to service-centric. After all, this is what ITSM is about. However, over the last half-decade, the corporate needs of ITSM have evolved – especially with the move to hybrid-working practices – with technology seen as a critical employee enabler, not just a business enabler.
This is driving one of the hottest ITSM trends – employee experience management. With the need to understand how IT service delivery and support capabilities either help or hinder employees in the work, they need to do. The experience data also helps identify “what matters most,” issues, and improvement opportunities, so employee experience becomes a primary change driver.
Importantly, employee-centric IT isn’t just about introducing new experience-focused metrics. Instead, it requires your organization to revisit ITSM’s “reason for being” (in your organization) such that ITSM capabilities can better align with business needs.
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Roy Atkinson |
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ITSM trend #2: The move to data-driven ITSM operations and improvements
In many ways, this is an extension of ITSM trend #1, in that service management capabilities are focused on “what matters most.” However, this trend targets the use of data to drive decisions, whether related to operational improvements, new or revised services, or some other part of the service management ecosystem.
For example, employee experience feedback can ascertain and improve employee productivity (which, in turn, enhances business operations and outcomes). With the data and insights, not only identifying issues but also the root causes and, once improvement initiatives are in flight, the adequacy of the improvements made.
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Daniel Breston |
ITSM trend #3: ITSM benefit amplification through intelligent automation
The use of artificial intelligence in ITSM has been a talked-about ITSM trend for at least half a decade. Now, ITSM solutions are delivering use cases that leverage machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities, mainly to improve existing ITSM tools and the IT service delivery and support needs they enable.
In the same way that ITSM solutions and native automation capabilities have improved ITSM over the last three decades, the application of artificial intelligence can amplify the benefits of ITSM further – and can be considered a relevant aspect of the future of service.
For example, in ITSM use cases, it:
- Improves business outcomes and employee experiences
- Reduces costs
- Increases execution speed
- Improves performance insight and decision-making
- Increases service availability, including 24/7 IT support.
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Doug Tedder |
ITSM trend #4: Enterprise Service Management as a platform for continued digital transformation
The non-IT use of ITSM capabilities is not new, but adopting what the ITSM industry has called “Enterprise Service Management” has grown as an enabler of the digital transformation strategies accelerated by the global pandemic.
While other business functions might not subscribe to the service management thinking of ITSM, the ITSM solution technologies are well suited for delivering the enablement that processes and employees need when working in a distributed and remote manner. This aligns with the view that Enterprise Service Management should be focused on “better business,” not on forcing IT’s ways of working on other business functions.
The addition of artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities to ITSM solutions is also a quick way to bring these new technologies into other business functions, whether improving the commonly-shared ITSM solution capabilities or reporting and analytics capabilities that leverage artificial intelligence to provide greater insight into performance and improvement.
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Greg Sanker |
ITSM trend #5: Optimizing operations, assets and services, experiences, and outcomes
One of the seven Guiding Principles in the ITIL 4 body of service management best practice guidance is “optimize and automate.” While automation has long been an ITSM trend, and artificial intelligence has brought about opportunities for intelligent automation, there’s likely still much that can be done related to optimization.
A good example is IT asset management (ITAM). Your organization might already have ITAM capabilities in place, but are they optimized? The optimization opportunity here has many parts.
First, there’s the optimization of hardware, software, and services, where asset use and costs are compared to business value to understand if they could be better employed elsewhere or even if their use ceased.
Second, there’s the optimization of ITAM practices, mainly through the latest best practices and automation. Importantly, this isn’t just the optimization of the status quo; it can also include adding new ITAM capabilities and perhaps widening ITAM coverage or scope.
Third, there’s the optimization of assets from an employee perspective – from how assets are acquired and refreshed to whether the employed assets are fit for purpose, where more costly assets might deliver a disproportionately higher increase in business value.
Finally, there’s the optimization of ITAM outcomes. For example, the greater use of ITAM data to support other business processes.
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Vawns Murphy |
ITSM trend #6: Self-help needs to be reinvented
IT self-service has been touted as the savior of corporate IT organizations for the last decade, offering “better, faster, cheaper” IT support. But while enterprise adoption levels have been high, low employee uptake and satisfaction have meant that self-service initiatives have failed to deliver the anticipated return on investment (ROI).
It’s no longer an ITSM trend in its self-service portal form. However, there’s still an employee demand for self-help that is driving a different ITSM trend based on the following:
- Remote-working employees needing to maximize their productivity
- Consumer-world service and support capabilities still influencing internal IT support capabilities
- Employee expectations requiring an immediacy of service and the removal of friction.
The self-help solution takes a different view of self-service capabilities, forgoing the traditional IT self-service portal (although this can still be offered to employees who prefer to use it) in favor of bringing IT support and self-help to employees. This involves using intelligent automation, often in the form of bots, and access channels that are already “within reach” of employees and don’t require them to hunt out the IT self-service portal for help.
Example alternatives to the traditional IT self-service portal include:
- Mobile apps offering employees immediate IT support access “at their fingertips.”
- Bots within work collaboration apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack
- Bots within line-of-business apps
- Voice-based access to support via devices such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home, or Android and iOS mobile devices.
The ultimate aim is to make accessing IT support quicker and easier for employees.
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Eleanor Draycott |
ITSM trend #7: The focus on employee well-being
Many IT organizations state that “people are our greatest assets.” However, one could argue that many aren’t treated as such, with this leading to well-being issues that, as well as harming the individuals, cause employee and productivity issues too.
The IT industry has long been thought to have employee well-being issues. Especially some high-pressure IT roles such as those related to IT support. Thankfully, related improvements have been made regarding how employee well-being is managed.
A 2022 survey by ITSM.tools found that only 2% of respondents thought that their organization didn’t have suitable mechanisms for preventing and helping with employee wellbeing issues (with 36% responding “yes” and 46% “yes, but they need improving”).
However, there were still reported well-being issues despite the improvement of corporate capabilities, with 67% of survey respondents stating that working in IT had adversely affected their well-being to some extent. This is made worse by 32% of respondents believing that their line managers are not suitably skilled to handle well-being issues and another 29% that they’re only partially capable.
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Simone Jo Moore |
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ITSM trend #8: Personalized support
Recently, experience management has been the center stage when it comes to innovation. We previously explored the subject in ITSM trends 1, 5, and 6, and now it's time to narrow it to personalized support.
This particular concept encourages IT support teams to "borrow" methods from sales, research, and development to customize interactions with customers and employees. The idea behind this approach is that service is a personal experience, it's unique, and the satisfaction that it brings depends on the details of every interaction.
There's no one right way to provide a good experience, but rather, it is important that your organization explores the matter and understands the opportunity and advantage it can provide.
The right way to do this would be to leverage personal details into the exchanges with customers and clients and to find a way to store that information along with their profiles, so every agent can use it to their advantage.
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Matt Beran |
ITSM trend #9: Measuring business-value focus, not simply ITSM operations
In some ways, this trend should have started this list of ITSM trends because everything listed above is ultimately about providing additional business value. However, this trend is more about measuring value creation, or co-creation, than value per se. It’s about understanding and reporting on the real difference ITSM has made to business operations and outcomes.
Unfortunately, though, value measurement is challenging. To start, value is subjective. Different business stakeholders value different things. They might also value things differently based on their circumstances. For example, senior management might be focused on operational cost reductions while team leaders focus on employee productivity.
So, an essential question for your IT organization in 2023 is, “How do our ITSM metrics measure and report the business value we help create?” It’s an interesting and helpful exercise to undertake because it’ll likely highlight the operational nature of the current ITSM metrics portfolio. For example, the propensity for metrics that measure “how long” or “how many” rather than considering the business impact, or outcomes, of what the IT service delivery and support activities achieved.
An easy starting point is to question whether existing metrics offer any interesting insights to business stakeholders, but there’s ultimately the need to have conversations around “what matters most.” Bring the focus back to ITSM trends #1 and #2 and the use of experience level agreements (XLAs) in addition to the often operationally-focused service level agreements (SLAs).
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Sophie Hussey |
ITSM trend #10: Sustainability as a competitive advantage
The 2021 AXELOS “ITIL 4: Sustainability in Digital and IT” publication defines sustainability as “a business approach focused on creating long-term value for society and other stakeholders by addressing the risks and opportunities associated with economic, environmental, and social developments.”
As stated in the AXELOS definition, it’s important to appreciate that sustainability is “a business approach,” not just an ITSM trend or a throwback to green IT initiatives. And corporate sustainability initiatives and sustainability programs might focus on a variety of issues, including climate change action, clean energy, water cleanliness, economic growth, species extinction, poverty and hunger, and health and education.
While many people might see corporate sustainability strategies and initiatives as the “right thing to do,” they offer corporate bottom-line benefits, too. This includes the improved public perceptions of organizations and their brands, creating a competitive advantage that drives sales and thus improves corporate financial results.
ITSM teams have a role to play in enabling corporate sustainability strategies, first, in helping the organization to deliver against its sustainability strategies, and second, in doing what they can to optimize the sustainability position of IT operations.
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Stephen Mann |
Final thoughts
This ITSM trend list isn’t exhaustive, but hopefully, it’s raised awareness of the broad spectrum of areas that might need to change within your organization and its IT operations.
A key takeaway is that there needs to be a deliberate focus on how ITSM capabilities positively affect business outcomes and value. For example, in:
- Better enabling employees and their productivity
- Driving data-based decision-making
- Benefitting from intelligent automation
- Facilitating corporate digital transformation initiatives
- Optimizing operations, assets and services, experiences, and outcomes.
It’s also important to ensure that improvement activities focus above the ITSM process level. While it might be good for your IT organization to be better at incident management, say, whatever improvements are made to this capability, they’ll likely be suboptimal without the necessary focus on some of the abovementioned trends.
