Top ITSM Trends of 2021

ITSM Trends

ITSM is a hot topic for people who manage IT infrastructure. And due to the immense changes, we have experienced this past year, there are new developments that show where the industry is headed.

‘Automation’ has been all the craze for the past few years, but it is now more relevant than ever. Then there is ‘digital transformation’, the buzzword of 2021, which is a result of the rapid levels of digitization that all organizations are experiencing.

While businesses were forced to adopt a hybrid working environment, ‘employee experience’ came to light as it relates to productivity.

Knowing that these trends can impact businesses in a major way, the question that comes to our mind is, “what can we expect to see on the ITSM landscape in 2021?”

More developments around the same trends? Or something entirely new? Let’s find out!

1. Digital Transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe effect on business operations and has created a necessity to enable and facilitate a hybrid way of working.

Technology now plays a significant role in business continuity operations and to gain a competitive edge to move forward. 77% of CIOs name Digital Transformation as their biggest budget priority of 2021.

With business teams being scattered, the employment of ITSM has become critical to provide seamless service delivery and to improve customer experience.

With a self-service portal and automation powered by digital workflows, employees can resolve common issues by themselves and the IT teams can focus on more value-adding tasks.

2. Automation powered by Artificial Intelligence

Automation has been in trend for a while but since it is being used in conjunction with AI, it is the most relevant thing now.

To better support remote employees for making work more productive, organizations have already started implementing AI & Automation. For example:

• Chatbots are reducing the workload for IT technicians by handling requesters with known issues.
• AI-powered smart suggestions allow requesters to discover solutions from the knowledgebase before even raising a ticket.
• AI is optimizing the way tickets are assigned to technicians.

According to a survey by Axelos, 77% of their respondents have said that AI and Machine Learning would free up ITSM professionals from routine tasks thus helping them to focus on pressing issues.

3. Enterprise Service Management

Enterprise Service Management in laymen’s terms simply is using IT services outside of IT functions.

According to Gartner, vendors are now concentrating product development efforts on non-IT use cases as market saturation of ITSM tools continues.

When we think of support departments, the first thing that comes to mind is the IT department. But if you think outside the box for a minute, you would realize that the HR, facilities, finance are all, in some way, support departments and while employees work remotely, not only IT but all business teams get flooded with multiple requests that can become difficult to handle.

Keeping this in mind, organizations have started using ITSM’s best practices to modify the platform’s workflow capabilities to support business services like HR onboarding, travel requests, procurement, etc.

4. Employee Experience

Thanks to the pandemic, employees are now more than ever dependent on technology to operate and deliver results. So organizations have realized the need for an ITSM solution to gauge, manage, and improve their employee experience.

To further understand how ITSM can help your employees read our blog: 3 ITSM Strategies to Help your Remote Workforce Thrive.

Organizations are also slowly changing their strategy to be more “people-centric”. They have understood that this is the time to prioritize employee wellbeing and provide the employees with a work environment that drives productivity, and gives them work satisfaction and happiness.

Recent well-being in ITSM survey found that 86% of survey respondents think that working in IT is going to get harder in the next three years and 71% of survey respondents state that working in IT has adversely affected their wellbeing.

The expectations of employees of what IT can do for them have changed; they have now realized the true potential of IT as an enabler for their productivity.

The increased interaction between the employees and IT is one of the main reasons why ITSM professionals are focusing on user experience.

5. AI Security

Cyber-crimes have increased exponentially with the adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Cybercriminals are penetrating targeted systems by using AL and ML in their malware programs.

This has persuaded organizations to shift focus on security and eliminate potential vulnerabilities using AI security. ITIL 4 also recommends specific organizational systems and procedures for risk management and data security to mitigate security threats and guarantee compliance to standard security practices.

The implementation of a cybersecurity mesh is among the top tech priorities for business in 2021, according to Gartner.