Dear IT Service Management, After ten years of working in different areas of tech, I’ve seen a lot of things, from cybersecurity to DevOps to ITSM. I’ve discovered that no matter what industry you’re in, they all have one thing in common: they’re overcomplicated to bits (ha, pun intended. Get it? Bits… tech…). ITSM is no exception. When talking to customers and industry experts, the pain points experienced are essentially the same. Managing the technology available across various vendors and our services is a struggle. And when you talk to peers, you’ll get vastly different answers on how to r ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming integral in the tech landscape, transforming virtual assistants and self-remediating software to enhance user experiences and propel IT automation in the workplace. Most of the tech workforce embraces AI, recognizing the potential advancements and business improvements it brings. In the workplace, smart technology aims to support and elevate the employee experience, not to replace human workers. Leveraging AI for Business Enhancement For businesses to effectively benefit from AI, leaders must ensure the technology is applied wisely and alig ..read more

Practical IT Service Management (ITSM) can be challenging when considering the growth of users and services to support. Additionally, ongoing trends in distributed enterprises with remote workforces, hybrid cloud, and cost-based pressures force companies to do more with less. Atop the usual demands, ITSM teams increasingly expect integrations with observability and security, giving IT support teams a single pane of glass across their roles and responsibilities. SolarWinds Service Desk is an ITSM solution built to maximize service desk staff productivity, automate service delivery, streamline t ..read more

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and traditional Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) are two approaches to service management within an organization. ESM serves as an extension of ITSM, bringing ITSM characteristics and capabilities to non-IT teams and departments. Traditional ITSM primarily involves managing and delivering IT services, such as technical support, incident management, and IT infrastructure maintenance.  These services cater to the specific needs of the IT department, focusing on technology-related tasks and processes. ESM integrates these but represents a b ..read more

Unplanned downtime is an eventuality every business tries to avoid but will face. In today’s digitally interconnected world, outages can be particularly damaging, especially if the business is unprepared. Not only can outages cause employee frustration and anger customers, leading to numerous intangible costs like lower satisfaction hurting a company’s reputation, but the loss of employee productivity caused by unplanned downtime can significantly affect the bottom line. With stakes this high, it’s no surprise how everyone—from the CTO to service desk technicians—is highly invested in tackling ..read more

In recent years, teams have drastically changed how they communicate and collaborate. With the rise of physical distancing and remote work, many businesses have found email slow and burdensome. Instead, they use chat clients like Microsoft Teams or Slack to effortlessly share information and solve problems without needing more online calls. It’s no surprise why ChatOps, sometimes called conversation-driven collaboration, is becoming increasingly crucial in ITSM organizations, tools, and use cases to enhance team collaboration. By automating the gathering of the right people, processes, and inf ..read more

Cloud adoption has grown in recent years. From organizations developing a cloud-native strategy to those focused on cloud migration, there are many different ways to consume the cloud. No matter the reason for choosing the cloud or how organizations get there, many overlook one critical piece of the puzzle: cloud asset management. Have you been frustrated by figuring out what you have deployed in what cloud? If so, you’re not alone. Let’s examine why this is so important. What is Asset Management in Cloud Computing? Cloud asset management is the process where organizations keep track of their ..read more

Internal IT support teams are often the first place employees turn for help with technical issues, and it’s important for team members to be able to quickly understand problems, identify solutions, and enable the employee to get back to work. Though there are plenty of technologies and organizational practices capable of improving support service teams, team-wide skills are the heart of every great service provider. In this post, I’ll cover the most important service desk skills customer-facing teams should have and explain how these skills can streamline workflows, reduce ticket costs, and im ..read more

Recently, technology roles have become more generalized—cloud computing, for instance, requires a broader knowledge of technologies like storage and network. As technology has continued to evolve over the decades, many job positions have blurred into many roles or even morphed into new roles with new responsibilities. One notable example I have seen in many organizations includes the situation where a system administrator role has morphed into a site reliability engineer (SRE) role. While this transformation typically applies to sysadmin roles, DBAs can also be included. In my previous role as ..read more

What Is a Workflow? Everything happening in an organization can be classified as a business process. This is true even if the process is a human looking at an Excel file saved to a file share and making decisions based on the numbers within. However, this process is prone to human error. Non-business processes can include cooking a recipe, whereas technology implementation might be something as complex as implementation of new code changes into an application or getting an IT trouble ticket entered and resolved. Each step in a given workflow triggers another task in the process until you get t ..read more