10 IT Trends that Will Shape Service Management in 2024
ITSM is becoming smarter and delivering even more bang for the buck—across the entire organization—than ever before.
What is IT Service Management (ITSM), and where is it headed in 2024? ITSM includes everything involved with designing, creating, delivering, supporting, and managing IT services. Although it began life as an IT best practice, it’s quickly evolving to support the entire business in new and innovative ways—with smart, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and automation front and center. If you’re in IT, you’ll want to know what’s in store for ITSM in 2024. Technological advancements from ITSM trends will affect not just how you get work done but how your colleagues across the organization will, too. Here’s what’s on the horizon for ITSM and how it will shape your business in 2024.
Information technology trends, challenges, & learnings that defined 2023
2023 was chock full of IT service management trends, challenges, and learnings that changed the way IT teams deliver IT services. IOT, automation, machine learning, and AI enabled IT teams get more done in less time and provide a better employee experience, but they ran into challenges with overspending when they invested in ITSM solutions that weren’t right-sized for their businesses. IT leaders discovered that ITSM could help IT align even more closely to business goals and enable digital transformation in multiple ways.
Trends
IT leaders tapped ITSM solutions to improve IT service management throughout 2023. For starters, they used IT service automation to accelerate service delivery, improve the employee experience, and mitigate IT staff burnout.
They also deployed bots to speed up ticket resolution and give employees an easier way to report the problems they were having with workplace technology.
Virtual agents also took on a larger share of tickets, reducing the overall volume of incoming tickets that their human colleagues had to deal with.
Thanks to these ITSM advancements, IT leaders were able to increase IT productivity and improve the quality of IT service they provided.
Challenges
According to Gartner, Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders overspent $750 million on unused ITSM features by 2023. So, even though businesses were clearly willing to invest in ITSM solutions, they ran into trouble getting as much value from their solutions as they had hoped they would.
This happened in part because some I&O leaders relied a little too heavily on industry resources like the Magic Quadrant or the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)’s request for proposal (RFP) templates when picking their ITSM tool.
If they had dug deeper into their own business requirements before consulting those resources, they would have had a better chance of avoiding this overspending.
Learnings
Businesses increasingly realized that ITSM can help them accelerate digital transformation on multiple fronts. Not only can ITSM improve IT service delivery, but it can also significantly improve the employee experience in hybrid and remote work settings.
ITSM’s AI and automation capabilities can also strengthen IT operations and information security. ITSM can also enable a full service catalog across the organization, giving employees one-stop shopping access to services from IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal, and other departments.
ITSM trends to look forward to in 2024
If you’re wondering, “What are the tech trends in 2024?”, this section has you covered. Learn how major technology trends like artificial intelligence, automation, employee experience, enterprise service management, and DevOps integration will change the game for IT and the business in 2024.
1. AI for IT Operations (AIOps)
IT operations teams have to manage a vast IT infrastructure spanning the data center, cloud services, edge computing, and a wide range of networks. Since the pandemic began and remote work became far more commonplace, this IT infrastructure has expanded to include home offices and similar settings. At the same time, many businesses are struggling to hire and retain the talented IT staff they need to ensure smooth IT operations.
AI for IT Operations (AIOps) will help IT businesses enhance IT operations management (ITOM) in 2024 and beyond. Chatbots will continue to see widespread adoption, but artificial intelligence also shows considerable promise for other ITSM/ITOM use cases such as help desk resolution, cybersecurity, compliance, incident reporting problem and problem management, integration/configuration management, and infrastructure/IT asset management (ITAM).
Businesses that plan for their AIOps implementation will have a better chance of achieving their goals. To get AIOps right, it’s a good idea to create a strategy, engage the C-suite early and often, start small, pick the right AIOps solution, and choose the right set of supporting tools.
2. Automation and collaboration
ITSM automation will help IT teams continue slashing their resolution times and improving customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. For example, it can help employees reset their own passwords instead of having to get help from the IT team, which makes their lives easier and reduces the volume of incoming help desk tickets.
At the team level, process automation can help businesses automate repetitive manual processes that involve collaboration, such as employee offboarding, multi-department approvals, and category-based routing for efficient service desk operations. Over time, access to greater amounts of data here will yield more targeted automation decisions and even smarter ways of work.
3. Integration
ITSM integration with other major business applications will still be one of the top IT service management trends in 2024. Best-in-class ITSM solutions are already well integrated with new technologies in the broader business ecosystem.
For example, IT teams can use Slack to boost productivity, Microsoft Teams to resolve tickets faster, Zoom to deliver instant support. ITSM can already integrate with incident management, customer relationship management (CRM), ITAM, employee onboarding tools, and even DevOps tools. ITSM will become increasingly interwoven with business processes in other ways, too.
4. Employee experience
Although many businesses have had a laser focus on the customer experience (CX) in recent years, they are now turning their attention to the employee experience (EX), too. According to a study from Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, 82% of executives say that employees’ happiness at work is impacted by how well the workplace technology performs.
Businesses are using their ITSM solutions as an optimization vehicle — to improve the employee experience in several areas. For example, by improving employee onboarding, rolling out convenient self-service portals, providing consumer-grade service catalogs, offering comprehensive knowledge bases, enabling responsive multichannel support, and delivering AI-powered chatbots that give helpful real-time answers. Expect these technology trends to accelerate in 2024.
5. Enterprise service management
Although ITSM solutions were developed for IT teams, other departments also use these tools to improve business processes and streamline the services they provide employees. This informal cross-departmental use is evolving into a formal practice known as enterprise service management (ESM). Improving cross-functional connectivity is becoming especially important for businesses that have distributed teams that are working remotely.
According to a research report from SDI and Sunrise Software, 47% of organizations surveyed said that their main service strategy will now focus on shift-left and enabling the self-sufficient user. Businesses that embrace ESM can give their employees a one-stop shop portal (or service catalog) of consumer-grade services from a range of teams such as IT, HR, Finance, and Facilities. It’s another way ITSM is helping businesses deliver a stellar employee experience.
6. DevOps and ITSM integration
DevOps is a best practice that businesses use to save money, conserve resources, and deliver scalable software. It also improves collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams. IT leaders are increasingly harnessing ITSM solutions to align their IT operations to DevOps processes, enable greater agility, and ultimately empower the business to release robust software at a faster pace.
7. ITIL
ITIL is one of the most well-known and widely adopted frameworks in the IT industry. Originally developed as a library of best practices, ITIL is now also considered a benchmark for delivering consistent, high-quality IT services.
The current version, ITIL 4, arrived in 2019. More than just an iteration, the ITIL 4 foundation was a transformative integration of ITIL with current methodologies such as Agile and DevOps. While there’s some speculation about when ITIL 5 will be released, Axelos hasn’t yet given word on when to expect it.
8. IT employee experience
One of the most worrying trends in IT involves employee burnout. As a recent well-being in ITSM survey from ITSM Tools found, 88% of survey respondents think working in IT will get harder (at least for some roles). Only eight percent of respondents said they didn’t think this would happen. At the same time, 67% of respondents say that working in IT has negatively affected their well-being to some extent.
IT leaders can use ITSM tools to address these challenges and give IT employees some of the support that they need. AI in service management can help IT teams scale IT service delivery while reducing the volume of incoming requests that IT pros actually have to deal with. By sending out artificial intelligence helpers like chatbots and virtual agents to handle front-line requests, for example, they will be able to accelerate ticket resolution and mitigate IT burnout.
9. Better ROI & reduced time to value
In the past, businesses struggled to get the most out of their ITSM solutions because they were spending money on features they didn’t actually use. This situation is changing for the better, though.
With a deeper understanding of their own requirements, greater optimization of data analytics, and improved ITSM integration with other core aspects of the business, companies will begin to see better overall ROI from their ITSM investments. By selecting ITSM solutions that are right-sized for their actual needs, these businesses will be able to reduce their time to value (TTV), too.
The future of ITSM software
As ITSM software becomes more integral to business outcomes, especially where the employee experience is concerned, interfaces will steadily become more user-friendly. The ITSM user experience will become even more intuitive, streamlined, responsive, and convenient than it already is today.
Rather than just filing tickets in complicated service portals and waiting for a response from a human IT service agent, employees will be able to have their issues handled by increasingly sophisticated chatbots and virtual agents on a wide range of channels.
As ITSM becomes more user-friendly for employees to navigate, it will use new technologies to lighten the load for IT. Advanced ITSM features like AI and automation will also play a strong role in the continued evolution of ITSM tools, helping IT teams get more done in less time and stemming the burnout that so many IT professionals have felt in recent years. In the long run, ITSM will help businesses remove obstacles to digital transformation and give them an even better shot at ensuring a healthy bottom line.
Conclusion
What will be the biggest trends in tech, you ask? Well, for starters, ITSM trends will continue evolving in 2024. As they do, ITSM solution providers will use new technologies like artificial intelligence (think: generative AI) and automation to accelerate IT service delivery and improve the employee experience.
As enterprise service management becomes a more established discipline, ITSM will continue developing to support business processes for HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal, and even DevOps teams.
Overall, ITSM will continue its process of aligning IT with business goals, which will help companies digitally transform at an even faster pace. To help prepare your IT team and the rest of your company for these advancements, you’ll want to keep tabs on these new trends for the digital world throughout the coming year.
