It’s easy to see that the IT service management (ITSM) landscape is changing quickly. In 2017, Forbes surveyed over 250 senior-level executives from varied industries and job functions to get insight into the state of the ITSM industry. Forbes found that:
- Out of those surveyed, 56 percent of respondents agreed that the pace of IT change or transformation is accelerating “significantly” or close to significantly.
- Two-thirds of the respondents (66 percent) reported that their ITSM budget has grown over the past three years.
- A majority of executives (56 percent) also indicated that their enterprise’s cloud computing efforts and big data initiatives have included ITSM to a large degree. Another 54 percent said that ITSM plays an important role in supporting their mobile computing efforts.
- Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported that the majority of their IT budget goes toward ongoing maintenance and management. Close to half (47 percent) indicated that they are turning toward cloud-based services to respond to budget and resource challenges for IT maintenance and management.
- More than two out of five executives (42 percent) report that they’ve seen reduced costs after implementing ITSM.
These findings prove how ITSM plays an important role in delivering value to emerging digital enterprises. The results also show that organizations are quickly adopting ITSM to reap its benefits. One of the most important findings from this survey revealed that roughly 25 percent of respondents have used either the same service desk solution or the same asset management system for more than five years!
Axelos, a UK-based firm, conducted a different study, which gives us some insight on how ITSM professionals feel about strategic collaborations. Seventy-six percent of the 330 ITSM professionals surveyed saw a growing need for coordination of services provided by vendors. This study also revealed that 92 percent of participants agreed that their strategic vision needs stronger alignment to their wider business.
With these stats in mind, it becomes pretty evident that organizations should utilize all the ITSM components they can. Packaging those components together, like a service desk with asset management, creates better usability for organizations, but why stop there? In today’s ITSM landscape, the ideal solution would be a service desk that provides unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities as well.
Collaboration among service desk providers and UEM solution providers has already started as a trend between major players. For example, Zendesk, a well-known service desk platform, has integrated with Desktop Central, an established UEM solution from ManageEngine. Desktop Central can manage all types of endpoints (desktops, laptops, smartphones, and more) from a central location accessible through the web. It provides a host of features in a single package, including:
- Automated patch management.
- Software and OS deployment.
- Mobile device management.
- Software and hardware asset management.
- Software metering and prohibition.
- Remote control.
- AD reports.
- Windows configurations.
- USB device management, power management, and much more.
These types of collaborations are key when it comes to the future of ITSM. By adopting a single-solution architecture in the form of a UEM-service desk combo, organizations can cut down on expenses and downtime. A combined solution approach also helps improve productivity and IT security, as well as increase overall visibility into IT assets.
We’ve observed time and again that regardless of the industry, customers benefit the most when vendors (even competitors) come together to provide the best possible service. Speaking to that observation, the changing face of ITSM won’t just help end users—a unified, corporate IT environment can also be achieved by vendors and service providers coming together.
