Overcome Complexity to Provide Excellent Service Management

There are two sides to the IT experience: Consumers and employees feel burdened by submitting tickets or calling a help line when there’s a problem. IT staffs that field the requests are reliant on data that’s manually collected, incomplete, or both, which makes their job harder. Service management is impacted. No one is happy, and both are overwhelmed.

Why is the service management experience so hampered? There are a number of reasons:

• Service desks are overwhelmed by the volume of incoming issues and lack the resources and/or information needed to operate efficiently.
• Operations managers face a situation where they do not know the entirety of the environment they need to manage and are forced to react to incidents after they occur, resulting in service delays, disruptions, and outages.
• The costs to deliver these services using traditional methods are too high because of the manual reconciliation work and duplication of effort that goes on across the various supporting teams.

Various reports cite that approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of the requests for service are from the top 20 percent of connectivity and security login issues all IT users face. Having staff manually unlock passwords all day is not a productive use of resources.

Line of business functions may compound the problem with self-procured technology to solve their business challenges. Yet when something goes wrong, IT is called upon to fix the issue and may not even be aware of the solutions’ existence, much less be prepared to resolve problems. Throw on top of all that technology and tooling silos that further slows things.

So, how do you provide exceptional service and operations management while struggling with the sheer complexity of the infrastructure, the volume of information, and events in your environment? While no way manual efforts will suffice, layering intelligence on top of core IT service management functions can boost the productivity of the IT staff and help customers with improved self-service.

See also: AIOps Takes Center Stage in IT Management Arsenal

AI service management encourages flexibility and scalability

AI service management (AISM) allows your organization to become proactive and predictive with intelligent automation that enables faster and more accurate service while reducing cost. These cost savings are recognized through the flexibility and scalability of operations which significantly reduces the infrastructure and people cost associated with routine requests. Those account unlock requests can be deflected, allowing end users to make the request by chatbot or text message and handled by automation.

Employing AI to service management AND IT operations (AIOps) – a combination referred to as ServiceOps – can lead to even greater operational efficiencies. A recent Hanover Research survey (sponsored by BMC) revealed that 69 percent of companies are applying AI to both their IT service management and IT operations management processes. The top use cases: Predictive alerting (60%), root cause analysis (56%), event prioritization (55%), predicting outages (54%), and service deck ticketing (50%).

Beyond handling events and fixing problems faster (or preventing them altogether), the concept of ServiceOps serves those looking to improve on their DevOps processes and increase agility. The Hanover survey also cites that AISM paired with AIOps also supports DevOps initiatives through improved change management capabilities.

Embracing tech enables disruption

With the average large organization making more than 10,000 change requests per year, that volume presents significant challenges to infrastructure and operations (I&O), which must determine if the changes being made are correct or if it will negatively impact performance downstream. This requires the ability to dynamically discover assets, efficiently manage operations, continuously optimize resources, and the ability to intelligently manage tickets.

This challenge of outdated service management capabilities is not about the CIO having good uptime or good ‘IT ticket handling’ metrics. It is about ‘business purpose.’ It’s about how to embrace constant tech-enabled disruption by adapting and evolving to stay abreast with it.

Organizations must not only break through these silos to provide this seamless experience but do so quickly, efficiently, and at the highest quality while constantly adapting as newer applications and services enter into the environment. AI can help reduce the service management toil, better serve customers through intelligent self-service, and solve problems faster.