Coronavirus Articles

Dashboard with a snake coiled through a pie chart, illustrating how IT audits reveal risks dashboards hide

What IT Audits Reveal That Service Dashboards Miss

Dashboards are essential for monitoring operational performance, but they only tell part of the story. This article explores why regular IT audits are critical for uncovering hidden risks, governance gaps, technical debt, ownership issues, and AI-related blind spots that service metrics often fail to reveal. Learn how combining audits with monitoring creates a more complete view of system health and long-term resilience.
Two portraits set into vintage washing machine windows, illustrating AI and humanising IT

A Process Is Still a Conversation: Humanising Service Management

Simone Jo Moore has spent decades arguing that the human sits at the center of every IT process, every tool rollout, every supplier relationship. In her Conversations with Giants episode, she talks about AI as a creative muse and a way to clear the drudgery, why SIAM is a relationship problem at heart, and why she’s still waiting for the industry to drop the dogma and get more honest about the people doing the work.
Illustration of a chat window reading "Can I speak with a human please?" next to a smiling AI chatbot icon, representing employee experience with AI-supported IT chat

How IT Support Can Deliver Better Employee Experiences

IT support is usually measured by first-contact resolution and ticket counts, but rarely by whether employees got what they needed. Drawing on a SolarWinds webinar, Stephen Mann looks at why AI’s biggest value lies in preventing issues before a ticket exists, why channel choice counts for more than any single preferred channel, and why most metrics track IT service desk mechanics rather than the outcomes employees experience.
Illustration of an IT professional walking through an office full of robots, representing the always-on AI question of why human staff are still needed

Always-On AI in ITSM: Why Every Service Desk Employee Will Ask “Why Am I Needed?”

Always-on AI is transforming the IT service desk, but technology alone won’t determine its success. This article examines why organizations must address human purpose, psychological safety and governance alongside AI deployment – and why answering “Why am I needed?” may be the most important question of all.
Illustration of IT workers at old computer terminals facing a large AI creature made of cash, representing uncontrolled AI software spend in asset management

Asset Management Teams Are Being Asked to Govern AI Spend They Can’t See

AI software is the fastest-growing cost in most IT estates, and most teams have no real view of it. The Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report bears that out: AI tracking is now the field’s biggest challenge, wasted AI spend is climbing, and FinOps is closing in on territory IT asset management used to own. The piece runs through the findings that count for asset and service teams, and what to fix first.
Illustration of a bearded man looking puzzled beside a large number 5 and question marks, representing the ITIL 5 naming debate

ITIL 5, ITIL v5, or ITIL (Version 5)? What Are People Actually Calling It?

PeopleCert calls it ITIL (Version 5), but Stephen Mann ran a LinkedIn poll to see what ITSM practitioners really call it, and the official name came in third. ITIL 5 took 41% of the vote, ITIL v5 pulled 26%, and the branded name only 22%. Stephen looks at why the shortcuts are winning, and why the official name probably won’t catch up.
Illustration of a shattered USB drive breaking apart, representing data loss from a deleted partition

Important IT Support Skills: How to Recover a Deleted Partition on a USB Drive

Losing access to a USB drive partition does not necessarily mean your data is gone. In many cases, deleted partitions, file system corruption, and accidental formatting only make files inaccessible rather than permanently erased. This guide explains how to recover USB data from a formatted or deleted partition, restore lost partitions using Windows tools and recovery software, and apply best practices to prevent future data loss.
Olympic rings illustration with small AI robot agents standing beside them, representing agentic AI coordination in ITSM

What ITSM Can Learn from the Olympics in the Agentic AI Era

The Olympics demonstrate that success depends on teamwork, preparation, governance, and seamless coordination – not individual talent alone. Discover how these same principles help IT organizations deploy Agentic AI successfully through better context sharing, AI governance, continuous validation, and clearly defined AI responsibilities.
Illustration of a person presenting an ITSM webinar on a laptop screen, with a live chat bubble and audience engagement icons

ITSM Webinars: Free On-Demand ITSM & ITIL Webinars

This “living” article has been created as a handy resource that lists the ITSM webinars ITSM.tools has participated in since 2021. It was most recently updated in 2026 with new webinars as needed.
Two grain silos on a farm, each displaying a portrait, representing silos in IT service management

Simplicity, Service, and the Discipline of Asking Why

Christian Nissen spent four decades in IT service management and helped shape ITIL along the way. In his Conversations with Giants episode, he makes the case that the industry keeps isolating capabilities it should be reintegrating, that it has swapped service for product, and that the skills worth learning are older and plainer than newcomers expect. Here are the ideas practitioners can use now.
Confused robot surrounded by a question mark, representing AI operating without context in IT service desks

Beyond Intelligence: Why Context Is the Missing Piece in AI-Driven IT Service Desks

AI is transforming IT service desks, but not in the way many expect. The real limitation isn’t the intelligence of AI models, it’s the lack of usable context in most IT environments. Between CMDB accuracy, knowledge articles, service catalogs, and tacit expertise, AI is only as effective as the information it can access. Without strong context, even the most advanced AI just scales existing issues.
Illustrated figure holding a large spreadsheet in a swirling colourful environment representing outdated ITAM spreadsheet tracking

IT Asset Management (ITAM) Is the Missing Link in Security, Compliance, and IT Budgeting

IT teams are juggling tight budgets, security gaps, compliance demands, and the growing pressure of AI. One discipline that could ease all of these keeps getting overlooked. Jana Mančíková argues that IT asset management has been around for years, but for too many organizations it still means a spreadsheet and good intentions. The article explains why that has to change, with examples of what a mature ITAM function looks like.
Illustrated laptop exploding with a stopwatch representing IT asset handoff failures in ITSM onboarding

5 IT Asset Handoff Gaps That Disrupt Onboarding and Offboarding (and How ITSM Teams Can Fix Them)

Most IT asset handoff failures aren’t technology issues, they’re workflow issues. Devices, tickets, and CMDB records exist, but unclear ownership, poor visibility, incomplete handoffs, and unmanaged exceptions create delays, security risks, and compliance gaps. Zubair Murtaza walks through five lifecycle gaps that undermine onboarding, offboarding, and device management, and the practical ways to close them.
Illustrated humans and AI robots in a meeting representing Agentic AI in ITSM collaboration

Agentic AI in ITSM Insights and Correlations

The 2026 HCLSoftware-sponsored ITSM.tools survey looks at how Agentic AI is being adopted across service management. This article breaks down the adoption trends, governance priorities, and regional differences the survey found, plus how AI maturity correlates with trust, business value, and organizational outcomes. It’s a snapshot of where Agentic AI is currently delivering in ITSM, and where it still isn’t.
Cartoon child dressed as a superhero standing in a server room representing ITSM heroics culture

Why ITSM Heroics Are Hurting Your Organization

From ancient myths to modern workplaces, we’ve always admired the people who step into chaos and save the day. In ITSM, that mindset plays out when organizations reward the person who resolves the crisis while ignoring the systemic issues that caused it. Alexandros Christias covers why ITSM heroics persist and how to shift recognition from firefighting to prevention.