Emerging Trends in ITSM Webinar: Key Take-Aways

Alemba’s recent webinar on Emerging Trends in ITSM provided valuable insights into key industry developments.

Our expert panellists, including GigaOm Principal Analyst Ron Williams and James Gander of Gander Service Management, discussed key topics such as Artificial Intelligence, ITSM automation, and more.

Here are some key take-aways from the panel discussions:

Automation in ITSM

“The first thing for us and our customers is understanding what is automation and how do you prioritise what you do look for in automation… [An important thing] is ensuring that you are doing stuff that is going to have a return on your investment. Don’t just automate everything.” - Clark Stalham, Alemba VP Service Delivery

“What needs to happen to begin with is understanding what automation is and it’s just grabbing some sort of input and getting an outcome from that with as little manual effort in the middle as possible. Now, if you are looking at a process to begin with and saying “Okay how do I automate it?”, you need to take a look at whether those inputs and outputs are working right now with the manual bit in the middle, because if they don’t, then the automation part is not going to work right either.” - Chris Forster, Alemba Technical Account Manager

“Those enterprises that have made the effort to mature their processes - to know what they want to do, when, and how - are the ones who would benefit most from any form of automation.” - Ron Williams, GigaOm Principal Analyst

“Generally, within the IT department there is a lot of willingness to automate more of the rote tasks, the easy wins, and the things that add value… Getting the wider organisation to open up to the possibilities [of automation]...they’re the ones that we have to do some real organisational change management on and show them the value to them and the value to the organisation.” - James Gander, Director of Gander Service Management

“The maturity of technical products outside of IT has improved to a point where you can now automate a lot more because they have much, much better APIs.” - Ron Williams, GigaOm Principal Analyst

“Coming up on our roadmap, we’re looking at workflow config sharing capabilities, so reusing that wealth of knowledge that our consultants or our customers have gone out and created - these workflows - so we are not starting from scratch again and being able to distribute from a central location this best practice - whether it’s real-world examples for a leaver and starter process, so people can understand what has worked in other places, or regulatory standards and other compliance that we need to adhere to. I think it will be very useful and build a community.” - Dave Ball, Alemba VP Product

Customer Experience

“What I see outside of ITSM, especially with smaller companies, is that the customer is more important than service level…That customer experience makes you go back more and more… [As a customer] I want the experience, not the service level. We do need more of that within IT… We need to focus on that customer experience and tell people how good we are and what level of customer service we provide.” - James Gander, Director of Gander Service Management

“What is the experience you want your customer to have, under what condition? …What is that for your customer? …We look at it as a technical problem to solve. It is not a technical problem. It is a problem that you have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Not the easiest thing to do.” - Ron Williams, GigaOm Principal Analyst

“The key thing is understanding what the customer expectation is for that experience, because that can vary vastly between organisations, age ranges, backgrounds, things like that. Understanding that expectation of what that customer experience needs to be is the most difficult and challenging part, especially if you are delivering a service to a broad audience.” - Chris Forster, Alemba Technical Account Manager

Chatbots & Virtual Agents

“The quality of the data and what you feed that chatbot will determine what you can actually do at the end of the day.” - Dave Ball, Alemba VP Product

James Gander poses two questions around chatbots:

“One is do you have good knowledge articles that can be fed to the agent? If you don't, why are you even bothering? Secondly, how are you going to prioritise [users that come to the service desk via the chatbot]? …Have I got enough people on the service desk to handle this additional route in?” - James Gander, Director of Gander Service Management

“It is important to understand what are the scenarios or the outcomes that you are trying to get from the chatbot. …There are different ways you can tackle implementing a chatbot and a virtual agent, but the key is to understand what you are actually trying to solve or improve.” - Chris Forster, Alemba Technical Account Manager

Artificial Intelligence

“Last year somebody took a ten ton rock and dropped it in our pond, and that pond is IT’s pond, and we do not have the slightest idea how big the tsunami from that’s going to be or what’s going to happen. …AI is going to be part of every system we have. How do we control it? How do we understand it? How do we manage it?” - Ron Williams, GigaOm Principal Analyst

Interested in learning more?

The webinar recording is available on demand for those interested in gaining further insights into the latest advancements in ITSM.

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