I must admit that the more I research IT service management (ITSM) — what it means, what its trends are, and what its future is — the more I feel like an explorer on a strikingly rich continent that so far the industry has either ignored, or misunderstood. The brand-new data that we've just received in EMA (working with my cohort, Valerie O'Connell) is a case in point.

Soon to be a webinar (on April 11), the data explores priorities in AI and analytics, automation, virtual agents, AI bots, and enterprise service management (ESM) initiatives globally — with 200 respondents in North American, 100 in Europe and 100 in Asia.

Ignored or Misunderstood?

So what do I mean by saying that by-and-large ITSM is either ignored, or misunderstood?

My primary concern is the industry's prejudice that ITSM, with its traditional center in the service desk, is a reactive blast-from-the-past with legacy processes, legacy mindsets, and legacy career opportunities.

Our data overall shows just the opposite, and points to a growing synergy across all the areas I just mentioned (AI/analytics, automation, virtual agents, AI bots and ESM) that frankly surprised us in doing our analysis. To be clear, this "synergy" is most strongly reflected in a consistently progressive group that shows advancements in all these areas, with high corresponding success rates across many multiple dimensions, from:

■ more effective incident handling

■ to improved end user and customer satisfaction

■ to greater IT operational efficiencies and cost savings

■ to accelerated levels of IT-to-business alignment

■ And the list goes on (actually it's quite long)

So What is ITSM Anyway?

Well, you'd think I'd know the answer since I've been researching ITSM for nearly a decade. But the truth is, both Valerie and I were curious to find out a number of dimensions, attributes, and qualities that reflect ITSM today. And we wanted to examine it from various perspectives, including IT executives, core ITSM teams, ITSM affiliates beyond the service desk, and non-IT executives and ITSM service consumers. We also looked at obvious differences in terms of size, geography, vertical, organization (central IT versus LOB-affiliated) and even age. For the latter we contrasted:

■ iGen (up to 4 years in their profession)

■ Millennials (5-10 years)

■ GenX (11-20 years)

■ And Boomers (more than 20 years)

… and found some surprising, and some not-so-surprising, differences.

I personally was most intrigued by the consistent indications from prior research that ITSM teams really do stretch well beyond the service desk, and that this trend tends to amplify as ITSM teams become more progressive. A list of whom we found among our respondent base (saving the actual numbers for the webinar), includes:

■ Operations

■ App management

■ Development

■ End user experience

■ Data science

■ Asset management

■ Architecture

■ Consultants

■ PC/ mobile management

■ Automation

■ Security

■ IoT

Read Reinventing ITSM? It's Not Going Away - Part 2, covering analytics, AI and automation.

To learn more about how and why, please join Valerie and me on April 11, as we discuss our findings in Automation, AI and Analytics: Reinventing ITSM.

In the meantime, I invite you to share your questions, perspectives, areas of interest, and concerns with us ...

Click here to email Dennis Drogseth with your comments