TOP ITSM Trends 2023: Preparing for the Future

There is little doubt about IT service management’s capabilities in facilitating organizational growth through innovation and constant customer service delivery.

It would be no wrong to say that ITSM success is a top priority for IT leaders to maximize business outcomes and remain competitive. This is where ITSM trends turn out to be a significant watchdog for organizations to fix existing drawbacks and set business expectations.

Though a competitive advantage, what Axelos reported in their survey about ITSM is quite surprising. As per the report, 4% of survey respondents had ITSM tools that lacked capabilities to satisfy their ITSM needs.

Most likely, this is one significant area to improve the ITSM inefficiencies. ITSM trends significantly help businesses that seek to facilitate path-breaking innovations and overcome product development and delivery challenges.

Here’s a rundown of top ITSM trends. Read along to discover your current needs in ITSM transformation.

ITSM is for IT support. It means there is a close interconnectedness between these two disciplines, which cannot progress without each other’s help. If ITSM cannot drive IT support efficiency, ITSM is meaningless.

Deep down, in theory, ITSM’s core principle is to enable or empower IT people to drive business outcomes and, in turn, help people gain benefits of IT process efficiency. Simply put, one core principle of ITSM is to improve employee experience management.

ITSMtools.com highlights the ABC framework to facilitate ITSM success. Depending on this, Attitude, Behavior, and Culture significantly pinpoint employee well-being,

• Employee attitude is essential to know their likelihood of adapting to new ITSM infrastructure, such as looking at ways wherein employees struggle and asking for their opinion for alleviation

• It is significantly important to know the behavior of employees toward a certain change, whether it is positive or mixed

• If employees possess a proactive mindset to promote a culture of change, wherein it demonstrates active participation

From this point of view, ITSM definitely hinges upon employee experience when it comes to deciding on ITSM trends.

Today’s ITSM is more AI-powered than a few years ago. With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning popularity, most CIOs or IT leaders want their ITSM to automate almost all of their Tier 0.5 or L0 activities.

On the other hand, businesses also seek to enable their employees to manage L1, L2, and L3 requests with high precision and accuracy by leveraging AI, ML, and automation capabilities.

At the core, AI and ML are devised to support the transformation of the existing infrastructure and drive employee productivity and business outcomes at scale.

Overall, an AI-driven ITSM is trending with cost-efficiency and employee well-being expected to improve.

In Evanta’s “The CIO’s Perspective: Data & Analytics” report in 2022, nearly 900 CIOs agreed that data and analytics are essential components for them to meet and drive organizational expectations.

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The mission-critical business objectives are,

• Driving business results

• Making data-driven decisions

• Enhancing operational processes

• Delivering business value

As per the views of one of the CIOs surveyed, transitioning to the SaaS or cloud-based ecosystem will eventually help them come closer to a data-powered framework.

It is similar to data-driven ITSM infrastructure as CIOs look forward to data-driven decisions to analyze performance gaps, detect user behavior based on ticket volumes, and prepare better data reporting for stakeholders to support future investments in data analytics.

Also, the likelihood of increased investment in data and analytics is quite significant.

The Gartner 2023 CIO and Technology Executive Agenda highlighted that investments in data and analytics would likely grow as per 55% of CIOs combined at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2022.

Self-problem-solving capabilities are always lucrative for employees irrespective of domain.

The challenge is ITSM does not offer decent adoption for its people because of its hard-to-nail architecture. However, self-service tops the demand for employee centricity and experience when it comes to prioritizing remote work settings.

Other than pushing your employees to learn and then leave the traditional ITSM architecture, it is better to adopt a different approach.

A conversational AI chatbot comes to your rescue.

The advantage is you can build your own chatbot for ITSM or ESM and embed that into familiar communication channels like Slack or Teams.

Plus, there are ample business benefits,

• No in-house dev team is required

• Reduce the need to invest in enterprise package

• Leverage no-code platform to get started fast

• Mass adoption to increase process efficiency

• Cost reduction

As per the 2022 STATE OF ITSM AND ESM SURVEY REPORT, half of the organizations surveyed agreed that they had extended their ITSM platforms to manage business processes in other departments.

Surprisingly, it is rarely observed that organizations leverageEnterprise Service Management or ESM to optimize ITSM principles. One glaring reason is that ESM is a costly investment for businesses, and because of this, only 31% of participant organizations are likely to have a broader ESM initiative.

Extending ITSM to areas such as Finance, HR, supply chain, marketing, and operations can help businesses reap great monetary benefits. Instead of only managing IT-related processes, businesses can also leverage ITSM to automate HR onboarding, accounts receivable and payable management, and supply chain operations outside of usual IT processes.

So, businesses can conveniently harness multiple tools to manage work at scale and leverage data to improve organization-wide process efficiency without spending much on tools and technologies.

Gabriel Grecco

Global Manager - IT Service Desk

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Businesses emphasize maximizing ITSM tools in view of cost optimization, performance improvement, and enhancing capabilities.

As is with the ITIL v3-backed ITSM, employee experience was compromised. An Advanced ITSM is top of mind for IT leaders.

Based on this notion, an advanced ITSM definitely would reflect the ITIL 4 framework, helping business leaders tap into real value through process efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and risk mitigation.

So, with an advanced ITSM, a business can

• Transform existing ITSM capabilities

• Use automation to reduce mundane work process

• Enhance employee-centricity

In 2023, one significant ITSM trend is ITAM or IT asset management. Optimizing is important if your business aims to achieve operational and cost-efficiency efficiency.

ITAM is significant from the perspective of user expectations and also customer-centricity. A robust ITAM capability ensures complete control and visibility across IT assets that further helps maintain IT asset lifecycle management. As a result, IT leaders can rapidly work across a few things,

• Which assets are fully optimized

• Which assets are no longer in use

• How not to miss a renewal

• What are the real business outcomes

Gen AI and LLMs are an extension of advanced AI capabilities. As soon as this AI phenomenon has arisen, it is trending across every touch point.

Alike many other areas, ChatGPT looks promising in reshaping knowledge management for ITSM.

ChatGPT is all set to reduce time and effort for content creators when creating knowledge management content. Surprisingly, ChatGPT is helpful in maintaining compliance as per ITIL 4 framework. As you look to unleash total control over knowledge management, ChatGPT ensures you do it efficiently and accurately.

Depending on the ITSM trends, value-driven ITSM could be the preferred business goal for business leaders.

Not just with ITSM tools but with any other digital platform, it is not all about deploying and forgetting it.

The key to driving ITSM success is to validate how effectively your investment works in your favor. To optimize the use cases and advantages, looking at the values your business can drive is necessary.

• Ensure your ITSM is not just able to deflect the ticket volumes but stop them from keeping coming back

• Your IT support team uses the tools and applications conveniently

• Notice if your ITSM is fast and simple to support customer-centric use cases

• Look at ITSM from the customer perspective in confirming its agility to aid IT support

• Ensure your ITSM solves requests at scale and reduces costs

Last but not the least, the ITSM trends for 2023 prioritizes the importance of sustainable IT operations or Greening IT operations.

In the era of digital transformation, when there is an explosion of digital tools, it is necessary for every business stakeholder to monitor the usage of technology stacks and reduce the carbon impact on the environment.

ITSM provides the easiest way through ITAM and Service Asset and Configuration Management to help optimize IT tools and control carbon footprint through appropriate metrics and data management.

The above-mentioned ITSM trends for 2023 are easy to follow to amplify the capability of your ITSM infrastructure.

Talk to your vendor now if you notice that your current platform does not scale as you grow and lack critical attributes to facilitate your mission-critical business objectives.

Conversely, if you want an enterprise-wide adoption of your ITSM process and to move beyond the traditional approach, chatbot-based self-serve help is critical for your business.

To learn more about how to deploy a chatbot to reflect the ITSM infrastructure inside employee interaction channels like Slack or Teams whilst remaining compliant with the ITSM trends in 2023, talk to our experts at Workativ. Let’s set up a demo call now.