EMA Research Report: What is the future of IT Service Management?

IT Service Management (ITSM) still draws heavily on the IT Infrastructure Library, practices originally forged 25+ years ago. Is ITSM still relevant today? How is ITSM evolving to keep pace with the dizzying rate of change and new innovations which have emerged in recent years? Sponsored by Interlink Software, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently set out to get a sense of ITSM’s place in the modern enterprise by polling 270 respondents from businesses across the globe.

The research examines ITSM trends and priorities, taken from the perspective of the interconnected trinity of technology, organisation and process. Beyond service desk specific matters EMA also looked at the influence of the wider ecosystem surrounding ITSM, including the cloud, agile, big data, analytics and automation.

The results suggest that the role of ITSM remains pivotal in progressive, dynamic, service-centric IT organisations and is key to achieving harmony across operations, development and business stakeholders. For example 80% of respondents plan to integrate ITSM and DevOps (Agile), whilst cloud adoption is driving integrated operations, IT process automation and automation for configuration and change management.

Compared to similar ITSM research carried out in 2013, EMA conclude that the findings are indicative that many organisations are on a trajectory ahead of “existing market thinking” – which “underscores the need to bring process, workflow, automation, and dialog between the service desk and the rest of IT into a far more unified whole than in the past. It also suggests that technologies like “big data for IT”—so often referred to as “IT operations analytics”—belong as much to this shared mix of capabilities as does trouble ticketing and workflow.”

The SITS15 – The IT Service Management Show is fast approaching and it’ll be interesting to see at first hand how many attendees we meet are on the path towards a truly unified, business aligned approach to ITSM.

What is the Future of IT Service Management?

Read the full EMA Research Report Summary by Dennis Nils Drogseth here