IT Service Management (ITSM) is a critical component of successful IT operations. As businesses increasingly rely on complex and diverse IT environments, ensuring seamless service delivery, and optimizing resources with the right ITSM software has never been more pivotal. Today, IT organizations face a range of significant challenges that can impact the effectiveness and efficiency of IT operations.
The complexities of integrating cloud and on-premises systems, resource constraints, evolving user expectations and the integration of advanced technologies like AI and automation can add layers of complication to any IT organization.
In this article, we will delve into these pressing challenges, exploring how they affect IT organizations and what strategies can be employed to address them. Whether you’re grappling with change management, navigating skills shortages or seeking to enhance user experience, understanding these issues and their solutions is crucial for optimizing your ITSM processes.
Understanding the Complexity of IT Environments
It’s no secret IT environments are more intricate than ever before. Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud services, hybrid infrastructures and microservices architectures to meet their diverse needs. While these advancements offer flexibility and scalability, they also introduce significant complexity into the IT ecosystem.
Common challenges include:
- Integration Difficulties – Managing a blend of on-premises systems, private and public clouds and microservices requires seamless integration. The challenge lies in ensuring that these diverse components work together efficiently without causing disruptions or creating data silos.
- Visibility and Control – With disparate systems and technologies, gaining a unified view of IT operations becomes challenging. This lack of visibility can hinder effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and management of IT services.
- Performance Management – Different environments have unique performance metrics and requirements. Balancing these while ensuring optimal service delivery across all platforms can be a daunting task.
So how can you solve these challenges? To start, you can use a service management platform that includes an integration and automation layer. When you do this you gain visibility along with better security and governance over APIs and apps that connect your systems and pass data back and forth. A modern integration and automation solution like iPaaS makes it easy to connect all these systems so that they can seamlessly talk to each other, and that data can flow across applications with the right governance checks in place.
Addressing Resource Constraints
Limited budgets and reduced staffing are challenges many businesses and organizations face – leaving IT leaders and their teams to juggle multiple responsibilities with finite resources. This balancing act can strain operations and impact the effectiveness of service management and delivery.
Common challenges include:
- Budget Limitations – Tight budgets can restrict the ability to invest in new technologies, tools or staff, making it difficult to implement or enhance ITSM processes. Organizations often find themselves constrained by financial limits that prevent them from acquiring necessary resources or upgrading existing systems.
- Staffing Shortages – A shortage of skilled IT professionals can hinder the implementation and maintenance of effective ITSM practices. Overworked staff may struggle to manage increasing workloads, leading to potential burnout and decreased productivity.
- Competing Priorities – IT departments frequently face competing demands from various business units. Balancing these priorities while managing ITSM processes can lead to resource strain and may result in some initiatives being deprioritized or delayed.
To combat these challenges, many organizations are implementing no-code/low-code ITSM systems with automation and bolstering their self-service options for end-users.
Low-code/no-code ITSM tools have been gaining in popularity in recent years because they democratize technology that was previously only available to developers and make it available to anyone. Unlike traditional scripting, these platforms feature prebuilt drag-and-drop actions and tasks that you can use to build out flows and automate actions. Using a no-code or low-code platform can save your staff time and money. Especially when it comes to tackling integration backlogs.
With the right codeless ITSM software, you can:
- Reduce Administrative Resources – Codeless ITSM systems allow organizations to manage the platform with less than one Full Time Employee (FTE); this could be to create configurations, create new workflows, set up automations or even create new forms.
- Enable Faster Expansion for Enterprise Service Management (ESM) – When you consider the evolution of ITSM platforms, one key development has been the expansion of enterprise service. The concepts and structure that worked so well for IT now work for other teams such as HR, marketing and facilities. However, to really make this work, the platform needs low-code/no-code. This will allow for quick and easy spin-up of new applications for various groups and then with segregated admin, each group can easily manage their own application. For instance, if HR wants to create a new form for “Register Child for Bring Your Child to Work Day” – this can be done. HR can create a form, add the widget to a desktop for tracking and even put a button on the service portal – all without the assistance of IT resources.
- Make Enterprise Integration Easy – When systems run in code-heavy environments, it makes integration harder. This is another reason why CIOs are seeking codeless platforms that can be more easily integrated. ITSM platforms such as TeamDynamix are now also using codeless iPaaS to facilitate enterprise integration and workflow.
Regardless of the ITSM tool you have in place, one of the first things any organization can do to help lessen the strain on its IT service desk is to implement a self-service strategy as part of its service management and delivery. Service desk teams can encourage self-service through the provision of relevant knowledge and resources via a self-service portal.
At Ellsworth Adhesives, a global corporation that supplies a wide range of adhesives, sealants, lubricants, coatings, encapsulants, tapes, soldering products, surface preparations, specialty chemicals and dispensing equipment.
After switching to TeamDynamix for Enterprise Service Management (ESM), the team at Ellsworth Adhesives launched a self-service portal and it’s been a game-changer.
Within the IT department, the help desk used to receive about 80 percent of service requests through email, 15 percent through phone calls and walkups and only 5 percent through the service portal.
Now, 95 percent of requests come through the portal, 5 percent come through walkups, and the help desk team no longer accepts email requests.
To make it as easy as possible for people to use the service portal, the IT department created an app that opens the portal automatically on employees’ desktops.
“We were getting 80 to 90 service requests per day, and the help desk team couldn’t filter and rout them all quickly enough,” Adam Crichlow, IT service desk manager, said. With the portal, however, this all happens automatically. This shift alone has cut the time it takes from creating to resolving a service ticket nearly in half.
Using TeamDynamix “has freed up staff time right away,” Crichlow said—a benefit the company realized “almost on day one” of using the system.
How to Integrate Automation and AI
As technology continues to advance, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming integral to IT Service Management (ITSM). These technologies promise enhanced efficiency, reduced operational costs and improved service delivery. However, integrating automation and AI into existing ITSM processes presents its own set of challenges.
Those challenges include:
- Integration Complexity – Implementing automation and AI tools into established ITSM frameworks can be complex. Integrating these technologies with existing systems often requires careful planning and coordination to ensure compatibility and seamless operation.
- Change Management – Introducing automation and AI can lead to significant changes in IT workflows and processes. Managing this transition effectively is crucial to minimize disruption and ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and prepared for the changes.
- Skill Gaps – Effective deployment of automation and AI tools can require specialized skills and knowledge. Finding a vendor dedicated to supporting your organization with education and training is essential.
For many organizations and businesses, a good entry point for AI is through the use of chatbots that utilize AI or conversational AI on a self-service portal to better facilitate self-service for end-users. However, there are many chatbots on the market and many that promise AI but fall short in execution.
According to a recent market study, there aren’t many companies satisfied with their current chatbots. The study found that traditional chatbots have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of negative eight—far from a ringing endorsement—and 65 percent of those surveyed said their solution is not widely adopted by their customers. The addition of conversational AI, however, makes a huge difference— using a conversational AI chatbot increased the adoption rate of the overall chat solution from 16 percent to 50 percent.
For IT leaders looking to optimize user interactions, conversational AI offers a suite of benefits:
- Enhanced Customer Engagement: By providing a more natural, human-like conversation, users are more likely to engage and spend more time interacting with your self-service portal.
- 24/7 Availability: Conversational AI systems don’t sleep. They offer round-the-clock service, ensuring your customers’ queries are addressed when it’s convenient for them.
- Efficiency in Service: Being conversational, these AI models can handle multiple user queries simultaneously and provide quick, relevant answers, drastically reducing wait times.
- Analytics and Personalization: Through advanced user data analysis, conversational AI allows for highly personalized interactions, catering to individual preferences and user history.
Conversational AI brings a number of additional benefits to service management teams when paired with enterprise integration and automation (using iPaaS). This combination can elevate chat from a glorified knowledge base search engine into an automated, action-centered channel to field requests through the use of dynamic forms or conversation flows.
For Bowdoin College, client experience is their number one priority. With the help of TeamDynamix, Bowdoin College has supercharged its support desk with conversational AI —allowing customers and guests to get help with anything from setting up their devices to increasing their print balances all without the need for human intervention.
“Conversational AI is not generative AI,” explained Jason Pelletier, senior director of client services and technology for Bowdoin College. “It won’t hallucinate or make up random responses to questions in the same way ChatGPT does. Helping customers understand the difference between conversational AI and generative AI is important for adoption.”
Conversational AI leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) as an AI component to help better understand the customer’s utterance or request. By using NLP along with intent-matching data, the answers can become more and more accurate. When you pair this with enterprise integration, custom forms, workflow and automation – you have a new way to chat.
“Being able to integrate the bot with backend systems is very exciting,” Pelletier said. “With TeamDynamix, we have one platform for ITSM with a chat tool that can integrate with our enterprise systems, and then from there we can build automation – this is something we could never have done with our previous solution.”
Employees have traditionally reached out to the IT support team to ask when their computer is eligible for replacement.
Now, the bot can answer this question automatically with a tailored personalized answer. By integrating the chat with the asset management system, the query will take the users’ information from SSO to then identify and look up their asset records. Once retrieved, the chat can then take that information back to the chat window.
“We are answering questions faster, with accurate personalized data,” Pelletier said. “When a customer has a question about their equipment, the chat is integrated back into our asset system so that it can give full details to the user.”
In a more fun and whimsical example of the bot’s capabilities, students and staff can even ask it what’s for lunch or dinner at a specific dining facility—and the bot will return the full menu.
“The students use this capability all the time because it’s the fastest way to find out what’s for lunch,” Pelletier said. “It’s something that drives people back to the bot, which is the whole point. You want people to use it, even if it’s for silly reasons because eventually they’ll figure, ‘Hey, I’m going to ask it how to get support for my laptop as well.’”
Although the effort required to set up the bot has been minor, its impact has been anything but so far. It has enabled IT staff to offload much of the work they do in answering peoples’ questions to the bot, allowing them to focus on more important tasks.
“We’re just scraping the surface right now,” Pelletier said. “Eventually, I think we could have the bot handle up to 30 percent of the questions our help desk staff are getting now.”
Not only does the bot reduce the workload for IT support staff; but it also creates a better and more equitable experience for students.
“Some people are outgoing, and they have no problem in coming to our Tech Hub to get technical support,” Pelletier explained. “Others have no problem communicating by email. But there are also many users with a language barrier or another reason why they might feel uncomfortable interacting with an actual person. There are also some users who are night owls and need support late at night when we’re closed.
The chatbot allows us to meet users where they are and give them the assistance they need—whenever, wherever and however they might want it. If we can relieve even some of the stress they might feel, that enhances their experience.”
By understanding and addressing these common ITSM challenges, IT departments can enhance their service delivery, improve operational efficiency and better support their organizations’ strategic goals. Embracing best practices, leveraging innovative tools and fostering a culture of continuous improvement is key to navigating these challenges successfully.