Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry, and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 5 covers ITSM.

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

AI -DRIVEN ITSM

An expected trend in 2022 in the ITSM world is Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven IT service management. AI-driven service management is the application of AI technology to IT service management. The use of AI is expected to grow significantly in 2022. With support organizations regularly being asked to do more with less, even while experiencing a significant increase in pandemic and post-pandemic ticket volumes, AI-driven service management increases the efficiency of support organizations back to pre-pandemic levels, even when taking the increased workload into account.
Bill Kane
Director, ServiceNow Practice, Synoptek

The historic growth in digital service initiatives over the past 18-months will increase the number of IT incidents by 10- to 20-fold. Human-generated incidents will increase 2X-4X as employees expect consumer-like experiences and self-service options, while machine-generate incidents will increase up to 10X as more data is ingested from monitoring, logging, and performance tools. Traditional approaches of segmenting IT operations and IT service management teams into separate groups in combination with disjointed workflows cannot keep pace. In the year ahead, the need for AI-powered service operations will be imperative to deflect incidents for service teams, automate common operations, and predict outages before users are impacted. The power of AI-powered service operations will enable the elimination of silos, the ability to analyze data from multiple sources, and provide contextual information to both the service and operations teams to meet the growing demands of digital services we will see in 2022.
Matt Gowarty
Senior Manager, Product Marketing, IT Operations Management, ServiceNow

It's clear that AI-powered automation universally improves the speed and effectiveness of IT service to the enterprise. What's less clear is where the lines between ITSM and IT operations management should be drawn — if they should be drawn at all. The one-two punch of AI/ML and automation blurs the lines between functional domains enabling convergence of ITSM and ITOM in Service Ops. Game-changing disciplines such as DevOps and SRE require new levels of interaction and automation for cross-domain workflows, efficiencies, and business outcomes. As always, the IT-devil will be in the organizational details.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Digital Service Execution, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

ITSM AND AUTOMATION

Companies that don't embrace automation will no longer be able to effectively manage their infrastructures or provide service levels comparable with companies using automation. There's just too much data. Businesses relying on manual methods will collect mountains of data, incur huge data storage costs and have no way to create value from this data.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

CIOs are looking to deflect 50-75% of incidents over the next few years, dramatically transforming the IT organization and unleashing productivity.  Starting with conversational chatbots, AI-based automation used in service management activities will achieve escape velocity with more and more deployments happening. When combined with the power of AIOps — that will predict and prevent iincidents from occurring — the result will be fewer tickets. In the year ahead, we'll see a meaningful reduction in manual work through use of AI/ML technologies. This will go beyond deflection using chatbots, to an AI assisted experience for agents that will lead to faster issue resolution and improved productivity.
Manish Srivastava
VP, ITSM Product Management, ServiceNow

Automation removes friction between Infrastructure and IT Teams

Friction between IT and infrastructure teams often occurs as a result of siloed workflows that cause backlog and frustration for both sides when collaborating on projects. For example, if an IT team handling batch operations finds an issue in the infrastructure layer, they will often have to wait for the infrastructure team to get online for a correction to be made, which then causes frustration across the business. In 2022, automation will remove friction between infrastructure and IT teams by automatically diagnosing failures or delays of batch jobs by checking the health and underlying infrastructure of each job. This is a key priority for many organizations undergoing digital transformation, as 75% of businesses need to upgrade IT Infrastructure to utilize new technologies. As a result, smoothing the relationships and interactions between IT and infrastructure teams will only serve to advance digital transformation initiatives. Automation can analyze historical data to mine problem signatures, assess risks and report areas that need attention, allowing teams to get a sense of the potential delays and have enough time to take timely corrective actions. This will give back time to both IT and infrastructure teams to focus on other tasks and key priorities.
Akhilesh Tripathi
CEO, Digitate

HYPERAUTOMATION

Hyperautomation growth in IT service management and beyond is another anticipated 2022 trend. Hyperautomation enables increased efficiencies in the identification, analysis and automation of as many key business and operational support processes as possible, as quickly as possible.
Bill Kane
Director, ServiceNow Practice, Synoptek

AUTOMATION FEATURES IN INCIDENT RESPONSE

Automation will continue to feature prominently in Incident Response improvement plans as more companies realize the magnitudes of improvements that can be made from acknowledgment to resolution.
Damon Edwards
Senior Director, Product, PagerDuty

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT BECOMES RELIABILITY MANAGEMENT

Incident management will evolve into something like "reliability management" as a more service-oriented approach wends its way into even operations functions.
Julian Dunn
Director of Product Marketing, PagerDuty

ENTERPRISE SERVICE MANAGEMENT

As data and expertise from IT operations are inching their way into non-IT areas of organizations, such as marketing and human resources, it makes sense to IT Central Station users that Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solutions will begin to be adopted organization-wide as a long-term business growth strategy.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station, (soon to be PeerSpot)

AI-DRIVEN AUTOMATION

There has been a significant worker shortage across industries in 2021, and IT departments have been no exception to the trend. In fact, Gartner reports that IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies. IT teams are especially vulnerable to worker shortages, as it's a particularly stressful and time-consuming job that receives little recognition, but is one of the first roles to be blamed when something goes wrong. However, modern IT operations (ITOps) are reaching a point of inflection where we will see more and more organizations adopt ITOps automation driven by AI (AIOps) to support day-to-day processes. For example, automating batch jobs can save IT teams from having to work through the night to ensure that other employees within the entire organization can do their jobs come morning. In 2022 and beyond, enterprises will begin deploying AI-driven automation for batch job monitoring and fixing, which will not only eliminate the risk of human error in batch processes, but also give IT teams the freedom to leave work at a normal time instead of staying up all night monitoring batch jobs. This will make IT work much more attractive to new and existing professionals, but retaining top-tier IT talent will depend more on an organization's willingness to support their IT teams through AI-driven process automation.
Akhilesh TripathiCEO, Digitate

Service Operations Convergence

In the year ahead, we will see traditional IT service and operations teams come together at an accelerated pace, using common technology solutions, to reduce costs, enhance the employee technology experience and drive higher levels of productivity throughout the organization. More specifically, these two teams using common solutions will mean providing the agent requisite visibility into related services and status in context, and surfacing relevant operational, config and observability data that they need to resolve issues faster. It also means that the siloed IT Service Desk of the past won't drive into the digital future.
Manish Srivastava
VP, ITSM Product Management, ServiceNow

Change Management Evolves

Traditional ITSM processes with cumbersome change management practices don't meet the needs of our world today. Change management will evolve to become more of a change enablement process with automation to help technology teams (including DevOps) push policy based changes that are auto-evaluated on risk, criticality and other factors, while continuing to provide visibility, governance and an audit trail.
Manish Srivastava
VP, ITSM Product Management, ServiceNow

SERVICE LEVEL OBJECTIVES

2021 saw high-profile outages costing several hundred million dollars in revenue and lost brand equity. In 2022, we can expect heightened scrutiny regarding the reliability and resiliency of software. The discipline of site reliability engineering, initially established at Google, will become even more prevalent in organizations that are tasked with developing, managing and running modern applications at scale. One driving concept behind this practice is Service Level Objectives (SLOs). With the ability to establish, monitor, and evaluate SLOs automatically, organizations will look to "pre-crime minority report-style" alerting, which enables teams to mitigate any potential failures before they bring an application down. For this to be successful, organizations need to ensure they have the right observability platform that can collect all the relevant data, and fully automate the evaluation process to eliminate blind spots. In addition, they need a platform with an AI engine that can pinpoint the root cause of issues affecting a service. As part of this evolution, we'll see organizations adopting a shift left approach, where SLOs are not just used in production, but across the SDLC to ensure only high-quality code makes it to production.
Andreas Grabner
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Dynatrace

HUMAN-CENTRIC TOOLING

While automated remediation will continue to improve and prevent many failures, the major black-swan incidents will require even more human-centric tooling and collaboration as we move more towards distributed and remote teams. The human still needs to be emphasized and supported, because after you've exhausted all of your automated remediation, it's still your responders who are faced with mitigating the highest severity incidents.
John Egan
CEO and Co-Founder, Kintaba

MAINTENANCE PLANS

In 2022 and beyond, I forecast many more service providers offering ongoing "maintenance plans" for customer sites in order to keep them running at optimal levels. At a minimum, these services should provide the following: regular framework updates (ex. WordPress version updates); plugin/extension/module version updates; technical debt review; backup verification; overall performance validation; security scanning and monitoring. By applying regular maintenance of a site and keeping an eye on the overall performance, a business can help to ensure that it keeps running well into the future.
Zachariah Frakes
Senior Manager, Application Management & Development, Synoptek

Go to: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6, covering the user experience.