Jun 22, 2021. By Aleena Mathew
ITSM is a methodology on how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services. These services include processes and activities to create, design, and support IT services. The practice of IT service management in IT organizations is present for a long time. With the implementation of ITSM, the IT team was capable of doing operations at lower cost, faster implementation, and well-defined, repeatable, and manageable IT processes. But, this methodology did not keep the lights on for a long time. As technologies developed, it became a must for the IT team to use these technologies for the IT organizations growth. For this to happen seamlessly, ITSM wont be enough. Thats where the implementation of ITIL came into the picture. ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices that are designed to support an organization in gaining optimal value from IT by aligning IT services with business strategy. While ITSM is an IT service methodology, ITIL is a commonly-used set of practices that outlines how to implement ITSM in a business. ITIL is a framework for implementing ITSM. This enabled in providing a proper framework for IT service. A streamlined method of IT service delivery was established.
ITSM and ITIL Challenges:
But, as the digital transformation took a big wave, most IT organizations were moving forward with this adoption. This brought in the use of the latest technologies and services such as virtualization, microservices, distributed services, and more. This diversity was widely accepted by most IT organizations. However, IT teams faced a great dilemma in coping and adopting this new change, as it became difficult for them to manage and monitor the entire system. This entirely affected the ITSM service and ITIL framework. With this new change, there was a delay in IT service delivery. This delay can lead to great business loss too. This situation needed a complete change. Manually processing and working were no longer beneficial. The solution here was the implementation of automation. That's where Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations(AIOps) came into the picture. This completely shifted ITSM to a new paradigm called AITSM.
The Evolution of AITSM - AI in ITSM
IT service management became a chaotic task with the upcome of the digital era. These issues were overcome with the implementation of AI in ITSM. That marked the rise of AITSM. AITSM is IT Service Management (ITSM) driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to efficiently and proactively automate and assist with tasks, actions, and requests at the IT service desk. AI is now widely being adopted as this implementation is capable of automating most of the IT mundane tasks and enables IT ticket remediation. That is, the implementation of AI in IT service management enabled the automation of IT service desk activities. IT operators did not need to spend hours on fixing problems and resolving the issues registered by users. Most IT users file their issues by ticketing them as incident tickets or service request tickets. When these tickets pile up, it becomes difficult for the IT operators to resolve and most tickets will be breached by not following the SLA set. Hence, with the upcome of AI, IT users just need to file the tickets. The AI-based models are capable of automatically routing and prioritizing the tickets and performing auto-remediation and auto-fulfillment. This enables in auto-resolving the IT tickets and IT service desk requests with zero-touch or low-touch operations. Let's say, for example, an IT user wants to log in to a system as he/she being new to the system. The person needs to move across the IT team multiple times for getting valid credentials to enter into the system. The request will be manually filled, processed and then only an approval state comes. This wastes a lot of time and effort. Now, this situation can be completely be automated with the help of AI. With the implementation of AI in ITSM, the user just needs to use a UI to issue the request and then, the AI-based will automatically process the request as a service request ticket and then fulfill the ticket. This automation enabled in saving operational cost and operational time.
Changes AIOps brought in AITSM:
With the implementation of AI in ITSM, most operations are done manually are now entirely under the control of AI and automation. One of the major changes brought into the system was, the entire operations such as manual ticket logging, manual ticket resolving, ticket routing, and prioritization were now completely shifted to automation. Hence, AI-based systems were capable of automatically handling all these operations and entirely speeding up operations. Also, AI helps minimize change management risks by preventing human error and improving analysis. With AI in ITSM, there was a change in IT service requests management, IT change management, and IT assets management configuration management database (CMDB). With AI, the process of service request handling was automated, change management, that is, identifying new patches or new versions release was automated, and also the management of assets and monitoring CMDB became easy.
A research study shows that 62% of enterprises are considering or already implementing AI into their ITSM strategy. IT service management (ITSM) will only become more automated with the incorporation of AI.
To learn more about Algomox AIOps, please visit our AIOps Platform Page.