Internet Trends Report: Five ITSM Takeaways

Aparna TA is a Product Analyst for ManageEngine.

There’s an interesting time ahead for ITSM as it moves into the cloud and evolves to support a mobile workforce. Help desks will have to adapt as end users’ expectations of ITSM solutions start to mirror those of consumer applications.

Every year, Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, produces a report on global internet trends. And this year’s narrative, like all others, is extremely sought out by technology companies and enthusiasts. This highly anticipated report sets the stage for the next big thing and sheds light on consumer technology adoption.

This year it covers a wide range of topics — from the increasing measurability of online advertising and the growing internet base in China to technological advancements in healthcare services. While the report doesn’t explicitly talk about the impact of global trends on ITSM, it leaves a lot of breadcrumbs that set expectations for the future of the ITSM industry. Here are a few things that might be relevant to IT service management.

1. Mobile is driving the consumerization of enterprise IT – People spent more than twice as much time on mobile, desktop and other connected devices in 2016 than they did in 2008. As the wall between personal life and work wears down, customer expectations on an enterprise level are mirroring those of consumer apps.

IT service desk vendors are starting to adopt a mobile-first strategy to stay relevant to the mobile workforce. The ability to put a service desk in the palms of end users helps to drastically increase self-service adoption and improve user satisfaction.

2. The cloud is accelerating change across enterprises – Cloud adoption has increased to new heights and is creating opportunities for new methods of software delivery such as APIs, microservices, elastic databases, etc. The shift from costlier perpetual licenses to cheaper subscription models has contributed to the rapid increase in cloud adoption, as the time and cost of setting up a cloud infrastructure are minimized.

As customers start to move toward a cloud-only IT infrastructure, SaaS has become a de facto model for many new vendors. With simple integrations, ITSM will be able to adopt newer technologies more quickly now than ever. The cloud also provides mobility and has the potential to take service desk operations beyond four walls to remote locations across the globe.

3. Rising security concerns dictating the need for more compliance – As enterprises adopt cloud infrastructure, they are more wary about their applications’ security and compliance. The increased adoption of public and private clouds has led to an exponential increase in the severity of malicious threats.

Cloud vendors are warming up to new data protection and security policies, especially after the EU’s announcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This illustrates the greater need for the ITSM community and cloud vendors to work together to keep vulnerabilities at bay.

4. Gaming can help optimize learning and engagement – There are about 2.6 billion gamers now compared to just 100 million in 1997, and gaming is still evolving. Gaming provides an intuitive interface to learn, and many organizations now use gamification to provide an engaging learning platform.

Many help desks have already implemented gamification in their tools to increase IT technician productivity. This can also be used to align IT technician’s day-to-day activities to business goals, thus creating a sense of accomplishment. Gaming can also be used to help end users adopt self-service portals and IT service desks faster.

5. Social media can provide an opportunity to improve customer service – In a survey by Ovum, more than 60 percent of organizations expressed the need to provide easier access to online support channels. The growth of new tools like APIs and browser extensions has paved the way for innovative service delivery models which integrate enterprise applications (such as help desks) with consumer applications, including social media. Many companies are actively using social media as a channel to address customer concerns and resolve issues.

Many help desks have built-in integrations with social channels that automatically convert tweets or posts into tickets, thus utilizing popular social channels to widen the reach of online support. Social media channels provide a unique opportunity to go the extra mile to delight customers while gaining trust and brand equity.

These are just some of the key internet trends that coincide or overlap with the trajectory of ITSM and related technologies. While this report focuses on major internet trends, there are several technologies like AI, machine learning, analytics and IoT that are expected to be big game changers in the future of ITSM.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton.

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