Technology Trends that are Changing the Service Desk: A blog post about how the service desk trends are being shifted by technology

IT support has evolved as a result of various factors that impact it. Such factors include business needs, technological advancements, work culture, and the ever-changing IT landscape. Presently, IT help desks have evolved into IT service desks, which handle a broader range of IT operations. The IT service desks are more aligned with strategic business objectives. These IT service desks are aided by ITSM (IT service management space) tools that improve their functionality. The journey doesn't end here; ITSM will undoubtedly continue to evolve. Several trends that will drive ITSM evolution shortly have been discussed below.

Extracting Benefits from AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Service Management

During the pandemic, businesses felt the need to implement tools that reduce manual labour. The reduction they needed was in the amount of manual labour required of their IT professionals. As a result of a rise in remote work, ticket volumes in ITSM have increased over the past year.

  Every service desk event commences with a ticket. A ticket is a historical document that holds information about a service event. Such information includes an incident, problem, or service request. Functionally, tickets govern and control the processing of a service event. They are required to route events for resolution between different resources. Tickets record all relevant data about a request, including:

• User notes,
• Ticket resolution,
• Technician notes,
• Workflow information as to how the ticket was handled,
• Other critical processing information

Ticket volumes have increased during the pandemic. However, employee hiring rates did not increase at the required rate, which has led to burnout among IT staff. AI has the potential to solve this issue that has kept the IT sector employees in distress. Artificial intelligence service management (AISM) is a budding approach that aims to solve the challenges of IT service management. To achieve this goal, AISM focuses on:

• Rapid innovation,
• Proactive prevention,
• Faster restoration of services,
• The employee and customer experience

An accurately-designed combination of AISM and AI engineering can help companies provide effective and scalable services. Additionally, it can restore the entire ITSM experience to its pre-pandemic efficiencies.

Promoting Growth through a System of Distributed Enterprise

The ability to quickly scale digital transformation has become a competitive requirement for all businesses. This entails providing consumer-grade experiences for both employees and customers. In addition, they must come with the ease of use, dependability, and performance that people expect from the best technology companies.

Millions of people are working from home around the world, and this figure is likely to increase. Hence, the year 2022 is pushing organizations to consider transformation into a fully distributed enterprise. ITSM processes and tools will play a primary role in developing this distributed enterprise. Further, the integration of ITSM processes with other systems will also be beneficial for the same.

Rise of Hyper-automation

Hyper-automation has been one of the top ITSM trends for several years. However, it is a technology that continues to grow rapidly to meet the pandemic’s requirements. To automate processes in impactful ways, hyper-automation combines a variety of technologies. The various technologies that are combined include robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and machine learning (ML). Companies who harness both  their subject matter expertise in all areas and hyper-automation will reap the following benefits:

• Cost reduction,
• Improvement in quality,
• Increase in speed and productivity,
• Enhancement in analytics, offering real-time, continuous intelligence for data-driven decision making
  

Incorporation of AI Security for Protection

With the increased use of technologies such as AI and ML, cybercriminals have discovered ways to compromise infrastructure. AI security, such as security analytics, can aid ITSM organizations in preventing vulnerabilities that may lead to security threats. AI security is likely to include the following three perspectives:

• Protecting systems powered by AI: This involves securing AI training data, training pipelines, and ML models.
• Enhancing security defence by leveraging AI: It involves the use of ML to uncover attacks, understand patterns, and automate parts of the cybersecurity processes.
• Suspecting the use of AI by attackers: This involves recognizing attacks to prevent them.
  

Application of the Enterprise Service Management

Enterprise service management (ESM) enforces a combination of the best practices of ITSM upon the entire organization. Extending service management principles beyond IT to the entire organization can help in the following ways:

• Gaining complete visibility into service processes,
• Gaining access to track business resources, customer requests, and service commitments 

Adopting ESM can reap the following benefits for organizations:

• Polishes productivity while reducing costs

It reduces the overall operational costs by resolving issues faster with less downtime. ESM also monitors assets and equipment to support the management of rapidly changing remote work environments. Additionally, the integration of asset management software with an ESM solution is beneficial. It brings ease in tracking equipment and other assets assigned to employees for supervisory purposes.

• Accelerates self-service efficiencies

On being combined with self-service technology, ESM significantly improves and increases self-service efficiency. There are various self-service capabilities of various departments that work together to increase the use of ESM tools.

• Adds Visibility and Governance

There can be several employees in any company. It is important to track their progress regularly. Consequently, the employee and their respective managers gain visibility. ESM keeps track of employee data and performance to grant high productivity.

• Supports the evolution of standards within an Enterprise

ESM, in conjunction with an acknowledgment management database, increases the potential of the process involved. Consequently, this assists businesses in identifying their standards and constantly working to evolve them.

• Improves Customer Experience

Employees can make internal requests that are quickly resolved as a result of improved communication and collaboration. As a result, customers and clients receive faster responses which improve their overall experience.

  It can be concluded that these emerging trends are capable of bringing efficiency and convenience to your team. Further, these trends seem proactive enough to solve various issues faced by organizations.