Five key ITSM trends for this year
/ Unsplash / Alessio Ferretti
Chat bots
Automation allows you to save time, money and human resources. One of the most promising areas of automation is technical support.
Companies introduce chat bots that take on part of the load of support specialists – they offer answers to the most common questions. Advanced systems are able to analyze the behavior of customers, often contacting customer support, and adapt ready-made solutions.
Similar products develop a whole range of companies. For example, ServiceNow. One solution, ServiceNow Virtual Agent, uses the capabilities of the IBM Watson supercomputer for speech recognition. The agent automatically creates tickets for user requests, checks their statuses and works with the CMDB – the database of IT infrastructure components. The ServiceNow chat bot was introduced at the University of Alberta – in two weeks the system learned how to handle 30% of incoming requests (plans to bring the volume up to 80%).
Gartner says that next year a quarter of global organizations will use virtual assistants as first-line technical support. This number will also include government agencies, which chat bots will save $ 40 billion annually (PDF, p. 3). But this will not stop there – the whole range of Helpdesk tools will evolve.
Development Automation
Flexible methodologies are not new, and many companies successfully use them. True, without a serious reorganization of the workflow of the meeting, sprints and other agile components are useless: it only becomes more difficult for employees to monitor the progress of development, which pulls down the efficiency of the whole process.
Here, software development management systems come to the rescue – another trend of this year. They allow you to control the entire life cycle of an application: from prototype to release, from support to release of new software versions.
We offer development management applications in the IT Guild. This is an SDLC (software development lifecycle) system. This is a software tool that combines several development methodologies at once (for example, waterfall and scrum) and makes it easier to adapt to work with them.
IB in the spotlight
The human factor is the main reason for the presence of vulnerabilities in IT systems. An example would be the situation with the NASA Jira-server, when the administrator left in open access data about the staff and projects of the agency. Another example is the hacking of the bureau Equifax in 2017, which occurred due to the fact that the organization did not install a patch covering the vulnerability in time.
/ Flickr / Wendelin Jacober / PD
SOAR (security operations, analytics and reporting) can reduce the human factor. They analyze security threats and generate reports with clear graphs and charts. Their main task is to help the company's specialists to make an effective and timely decision.
SOAR-systems help to halve the time required to detect and respond to vulnerabilities. So ServiceNow Security Operations, which we wrote about in one of our blog's articles, is a product of this class. He independently finds vulnerable components of the IT infrastructure and assesses their impact on business processes depending on the degree of risk.
ITSM goes to the clouds
In the coming years, the cloud services market will be the fastest growing IT segment. According to Gartner, in 2019 its growth will be 17.5%. This trend is followed by cloud solutions for IT infrastructure management.
Cloud ITSM-system we offer in the "IT Guild". Its main difference from the local system is that companies can only pay for the opportunities they use (ITOM, ITFM, ITAM, etc.). Cloud solutions come with pre-configured templates and pre-configured tools. With their help, organizations are able to quickly set up a working environment, bypassing many potential difficulties, and migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud, drawing on industry best practices.
Cloud ITSM, for example, has been introduced by SPLAT. The system helps to monitor IT assets and evaluate their performance. Also, applications from users are accepted and processed in the cloud – the unified system of accounting of requests has increased the degree of control over their execution.
/ Flickr / Kristof Magyar / CC BY
ITIL 4 is being adapted
Unlike previous versions, ITIL 4 concentrates on the basic principles and concepts of service management. In particular, the library was integrated with flexible software development methods – Agile, Lean and DevOps. She gives an idea of how these approaches should work together.
This year, companies using the library to manage IT will decide how innovations will impact their business processes. The ITIL documentation, which the developers have tried to make more understandable, should help with this. In the future, the fourth version will help to fine-tune ITIL for new trends: automation, DevOps practices, cloud systems.
What we write about in the corporate blog:
- Customer Service Management: how to manage customer service
- From Excel to Blockchain – own billing in ServiceNow
- ITAM: what is asset management
- IT project management – five challenges and how to overcome them
