Where others look at the service management market and see stagnation, I see one that’s ripe for disruption. There are many forces colliding at the moment making service delivery and operations teams reconsider their approach. They need to operate at high velocity and legacy tools are no longer cutting it.

Let’s explore some of the shifts in behavior and technology that will make service management a space to watch in the years to come.

Buh-bye to Bloat

Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders have been paying too much for their IT service management (ITSM) solution. Not by a little. By A LOT. According to Gartner^®, 8 out of 10 IT organizations are overspending on ITSM platform subscriptions by half of the contract value because they purchase functions that do not get fully used.¹

Legacy solutions have become bloated, dragging out the time it takes to get up and running and realize value from your investment. As leaders scrutinize every dollar spent, they are turning to more flexible, cost-efficient alternatives.

Saint-Gobain, a multinational manufacturing company, is an example of a company coming down on bloat. In 2020, the company embarked on an initiative to replace their unwieldy, expensive ITSM solution with Jira Service Management for 20,000 internal end-users. It took just a few weeks (not months!) to migrate the entire IT department and half of their end-users from one tool to the other. By switching providers, Saint-Gobain cut costs by 70% in the first year alone and projects an 82% reduction by the third year of deployment.

As I&O leaders dig deeper into the true ROI of their service management solutions, they’ll find opportunity to take a hatchet to product feature and budget bloat.

Not (just) Your IT Team’s Tool

IT teams have long been providing speedy service using an ITSM platform, and other teams are taking note. Teams across a company - like HR, Facilities, or Customer Service - need to respond to requests, capture and surface knowledge, and even track assets, just like IT.

Companies want one service management platform that spans teams and help manage all kinds of service requests.

CBS provides an example of this strategy in action. As one of the biggest networks in the United States with over 210 affiliates and between 12-18 hours of programming a day, CBS’s marketing department functions much like an agency within the company. The team uses their service management platform to process creative requests, keep an accurate measure of inputs and outputs, and improve their throughput and bandwidth across the team.

What does this mean for the service management tool you select for your organization? Firstly, it needs to be highly-configurable to satisfy a variety of use cases. Secondly, it must be simple enough for non-IT teams to use. And finally, the solution must be able to aggregate data related to a broad array of assets - from physical infrastructure to software components - so companies can address a wider range of challenges around security and compliance, inventory and billing, forecasting and planning, and more.

Help Me Get Help!

Getting help has never been harder for employees. Remote work makes it impossible to walk up to an in-person help desk. Email is tried and true, but doesn’t offer a great experience. Different teams work in different tools (Workday for HR, Coupa for Finance, DocuSign for Legal) and channels (Slack, Microsoft Teams, email), leaving employees to navigate a dozen apps and channels to get help.

Service management platforms can provide a fix for this fragmented experience. Solutions will continue to evolve to utilize omni-channel options - including virtual agent, portal, email, and phone - to provide help. The next stage of this evolution will come when a service management tool can provide a single “front door” for employees seeking help - no matter the communication channel or underlying system used to respond to a request.

AI Will Change the Game

While there’s a lot of hype around how generative AI will disrupt certain areas, the opportunity is here and now for this market. The nature of service management is completing often repeated requests…the perfect laboratory for AI experimentation and implementation. Some of the most immediate opportunities include:

• Using AI to autonomously orchestrate actions and complete complex goals
• Assisting agents to make better decisions and provide better responses, faster.
• Conversational AI will enable virtual (and human) agents to quickly find the right answer and summarize it from any knowledge or content repository.

Atlassian has integrated AI capabilities into Jira Service Management to help teams deliver exceptional support at scale, fast. Innovation is accelerating in this area and I’m excited Atlassian is leading the way here.

Join us for Atlassian Presents: High Velocity!

Atlassian Presents: High Velocity is our biggest service management event of the year. Hear about Jira Service Management’s latest advancements, go deep with technical demos, and hear from leaders at Domino's Pizza Enterprises and NRMA about how they are advancing service delivery. Register here to get access to the digital experience on November 8, 2023.

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¹ Gartner, A Buyer’s Guide to ITSM Platforms - 4 August 2022 - ID G00756271 - Chris Matchett, Rich Doheny. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.