2019 could be the year of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT service management (ITSM). To better understand why this may be the case, let’s take a closer look at AI, how it works and the benefits associated with it.

Although technology continues to evolve, the processes that support Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) have remained relatively unchanged for several decades. One of the main challenges to delivering high-quality IT services in this long-established approach is reactivity – that is, focusing on incident management as a means to resolve something that should never have happened in the first place.

Patrick, Vincent and myself founded Nexthink because we believed in a future in which IT departments and employees work together to have a great digital experience. At that time, we observed that IT departments were traditionally focused on server, network and applications and often neglected the employee experience as a key driver for success and productivity. At best, organizations were reactive to support users, instead of proactively fixing issues before employees were impacted.

In describing why Nexthink is a critical partner in their value-offering Morten Grønneb?k, Chief Commercial Officer at BusinessNow, said “What we were experiencing as a consultancy company was that SLAs might be green out there, but your customers or end-users’ satisfaction was often red.” Indeed, prior to Nexthink, BusinessNow was increasingly faced with a major issue: clients’ IT departments were blind to IT issues at the end-user level, although data centers seemed oper

AppDynamics and ServiceNow have been working together for many years to support our mutual customers. The first version of our alliance (version 1) included the integration of the AppDynamics flow map and application topology into the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB). In version 2, we added support for IT operations-specific use cases such as ServiceNow Event Management.

In today’s fast-paced working environment, employees tend to rely less and less on IT departments. The use of workplace technology has never before been this accessible and essential and employees are increasingly confident that they can work independently from IT to decide on their own external tools and solutions.

There’s a disconnect between business leaders and IT. As noted by a 2017 Forrester study conducted on behalf of Nexthink, just 36% of business users “think IT is aligned with the needs of the business,” even though technology services are now embedded into every aspect of enterprise culture, from mobile device use to wifi access to cloud computing.

Organizations need better network oversight. According to Information Week, recent data predicts “wasted” cloud spending on services and applications that aren’t fully utilized will reach $21 billion by 2021, while CIO points to Gartner research that suggests 30 to 40 percent of IT spending in large enterprises is actually funding shadow IT.

The transition to Agile development and continuous deployment has resulted in the DevOps movement to break down organizational walls. While there are many benefits to this approach, some best practices of traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) have been lost in the transition. Which ITSM processes and controls are still relevant and how can you adapt them to the new agile world?

There’s a job description you don’t see often, but unfortunately, it’s much closer to the truth about what companies are truly looking for these days in an IT manager. Technology has taken over the workplace.