Next-Generation ITSM: Why It Matters and Who’s in Charge

A new research report produced by respected analysts Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) and co-sponsored by Ivanti finds that ITSM is rapidly evolving beyond incidents, problems, changes, and user password reset requests. EMA’s findings offer both interesting observations and useful guidance to ITSM and IT decision makers seeking to achieve—and take full advantage of—that continuing evolution.

The new EMA report is entitled “Next-Generation IT Service Management: Changing the Future of IT.” For that report, EMA surveyed more than 260 respondents in North America and Europe, all of whom are involved in ITSM activities, directly, as managers, or as executives.

Why Next-Generation ITSM Matters Now

“ITSM is evolving in terms of both the technologies used and the role the ITSM team plays in the IT organization and the business as a whole. But this evolution is not without its obstacles and challenges, nor is it taking place in all IT organizations.”

Your ITSM team’s jobs are evolving, as their roles extend to other critical areas of your enterprise’s operations. The average respondent to the EMA survey is involved in four areas beyond ITSM. Those other areas of involvement and the percentage of respondents that cited each are summarized in Figure 1 below.

As ITSM teams become more involved in more areas critical to the business, those teams will need and want ITSM processes and solutions that support and enable that growing involvement. In many if not most enterprises, those processes and solutions will require modernization to deliver the power and flexibility ITSM teams will need to succeed.

Next-Generation ITSM: Who’s in Charge?

“When asked if there was a single service desk or multiple service desks in their ITSM organization, respondents were evenly split: 50% reported having a single service desk, and 50% reported having multiple service desks. However, when respondents were asked if their service desks were part of central IT, or were LOB [line of business] affiliated, the difference was far more dramatic, with 89% belonging to central IT and only 11% belonging to the LOB.”

These findings indicate that the number of service desks your enterprise supports is far less important than who manages your service desk(s). And if the EMA survey is an accurate indicator of reality at your enterprise, you need for ITSM to be managed by central IT and not individual lines of business.

Why? According to EMA’s research, because “central IT organizations were more likely to show a higher level of executive IT oversight. Central IT ITSM was also more likely to be engaged in DevOps support, more likely to enable cloud services through their service catalogs, and more likely to pursue big data and analytics. And central IT organizations were twice as likely to be slated for growth as LOB-affiliated IT organizations.”

You and your team must closely align your ITSM efforts with the needs and activities of each of your enterprise’s most critical lines of business. However, you must also manage those efforts consistently across the entire enterprise. Central IT likely has the most experience at deploying locally, yet managing globally at your enterprise. And central IT is also the team most likely to have experience and success modernizing technologies critical to multiple business functions and operations. This is especially true regarding the two leading strategic priorities identified by respondents to the EMA survey:

• “Improving end-user experience (internal to the business)
• “Integrated support for security/fraud”

Along with these strategic priorities, survey respondents identified “Social IT across ITSM staff and end users” as their top functional priority. Taken together, these three imperatives argue strongly for central IT oversight. They also all but demand modernization of legacy IT processes and technologies.

Ivanti: Your Next-Generation ITSM Partner

To read the entire EMA research report, click on the link below. To see how Ivanti can help you to modernize ITSM, improve your users’ experiences, and increase cybersecurity at your enterprise, check out our solutions online, or contact your local Ivanti office or partner. And look for other Ivanti blog posts that delve into the EMA report and next-generation ITSM, for more recommendations on how to achieve that goal at your enterprise.