Future Of ITSM Industry

Today, we see that business strategy is not only driving IT strategy but in some cases are being driven by IT Strategy. In future we will see these ‘some cases’ becoming ‘many cases’. This would be a time when IT would be integrated with business. We have already seen this shift of focus from ‘alignment’ to ‘integration’ in ITIL V3. Also, this would enable IT to effectively address the continuous evolution of organizations and their policies. 

One of my earlier blog has covered how integration of IT with business can happen. 

I believe the future of IT would be driven by some of the key ITIL processes or some specific areas of the same that has not been in much focus across majority of organizations. Also, the tools that would be enabling these processes or areas and facilitate real time decision making would drive the business of Software Product Companies who have such tools in their product catalog. 

Some key areas that would drive the future of ITSM industry would be: 

• Analytics: We have data everywhere. But today the reports or data analysis is predominantly being used to measure vendor performance and in other cases initiate service improvement plans (SIPs). We rarely see the ITSM data driving business decisions. Analytics would be a key for business enabling them to make real time decisions. 
• Automation: According to Forrester, “Service Management and Automation” is one of the key things for future. Automation would drive customer-centric, service-focused, and automated IT operations. It would reinforce the fundamental that customers and services always come first. Besides, automation will allow IT organization’s support and delivery of IT services to be faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality. 
• Proactive IT organizations: Currently we see that majority of IT organizations are highly reactive. Future IT organization would be highly proactive ones. 
• Some ITIL processes would gain importance or would address some key areas which are not being effectively addressed in IT organizations today: 
• Strategy For IT Services and Demand Management processes would enable organizations to innovate and plan to outpace competitors and meet demand.
• Financial Management would ensure that value of IT services are defined and managed. It would act as a decision making process for development and delivery of IT services. It would gain even more importance in cloud environment since charging units, charge per unit and cost per charging unit has to be effectively determined besides billing the customer (and customer’s customer) based on consumption. 
• Business and Service Capacity Management would gain prominence. Currently many organizations are managing capacity only at component level, i.e. they are having only component capacity management in place. 
• Change Management and Service Asset & Configuration Management processes would have more emphasis on focusing Services as CIs and Service Changes (Practically Service is not being recorded as a CI by many IT organizations) 
• Knowledge management would drive automation of management, control and facilitation of knowledge capture and sharing. 
• Proactive problem management, not effectively followed in many IT organizations, would drive pro-activeness. 
• Continual Service Improvement would gain focus so as to continually improve service performance and quality besides process efficiency and effectiveness