Ticket handoffs between IT, customer support, and engineering can lead to lost context, unclear ownership, and unresolved customer issues. Discover where handoffs break down and how to automate them safely.
Open-source ITSM add-ons for Znuny, OTOBO, and Zammad aren’t hard to find because they don’t exist. They’re hard to find because there’s no shared catalog. This article shares the six main places where plugins hide, explains why .opm compatibility is more fragile than it looks, and lays out a six-step checklist for testing an add-on before it reaches production.
A butcher shop drowning in paper invoices taught Mark Patnaude that small businesses don’t get simpler technology problems, just less room to recover from the wrong call. He argues the fix isn’t scaled-down enterprise bureaucracy but “minimum effective discipline,” and offers a five-question test any SMB can use before making a decision it can’t afford to get wrong.
Our industry has talked about the data trapped in ITSM tools for years, but the real issue isn’t collection; it’s collecting without a purpose. This piece looks at unused and underutilized ITSM data, why CMDBs are the classic example, and how AI is finally positioned to spot what’s wasted, what’s underused, and what should be collected next.
Every digital product carries a cost, but few organizations can say what that cost is, let alone what drives it. ITIL 4’s Service Financial Management practice turns spending on people, technology, suppliers, and process into information leaders can act on. This article looks at how the practice builds cost models, plans budgets, and why the answer differs depending on whether IT is core to the business or a supporting function.
Every ITSM transformation plan gives the platform an owner, a budget, and a schedule, while adoption gets a communications plan. Gartner and Bain data suggest that gap is where most programs fall short: leaders approve the model without knowing what it will ask of them, and practitioners wait to see whether it lasts. The piece makes the case for planning the people layer as a funded workstream.
At 60% average data accuracy and 5 million configuration items, a Fortune 50 CMDB is carrying roughly 2 million duplicate, stale, or orphaned records. Salil Kulkarni prices what this costs: $16 million a year in licensing overrun, plus $20 million in engineer time chasing bad data, before outages or security exposure enter the count. The fix proposed is a pre-processor that filters data before it reaches the CMDB.
Many IT service desks are buried in password resets and status requests, and the usual response is a full ITSM platform migration. Aditya Santhanam argues for a cheaper route: wrap conversational AI around the ITSM tool you already run, so AI agents work inside existing records, SLAs, and rules. The article covers seven use cases, a six-step rollout, what to keep humans on, and the metrics that show it works.
Most IT service desks can say exactly how long resolution took last month. Ask how long closure took, and the room goes quiet, because the SLA clock had already stopped by then. This article sets out six closure-stage patterns worth tracking, from zombie backlogs to calendar-driven closing, and how to redesign a Kanban board around aging and closure lag rather than the metrics resolution reports already cover.
Iran is rich in oil and gas, yet poor governance has held its technology sector back. A MedaNet practitioner with two decades of ITIL experience there argues the real problem was never a shortage of equipment; it was buying systems without managing them. Drawing on work across banks, oil and gas, and petrochemical companies, the article sets out why ITIL matters as a discipline for using what you already own.
An employee reports a dropped VPN connection, and every step of the IT service desk automation fires perfectly: intent read, ticket routed, history attached. The VPN still does not work. This gap between a well-handled ticket and a solved issue is the most common outcome in IT service desk automation today. The article maps a five-level outcome ladder and how to measure verified resolution instead of ticket volume.
AI costs are spiraling across enterprises, and budgets built for predictable per-seat SaaS costs were never designed for open-ended, per-token inference. Erhan Giral of BMC Helix walks through why unmonitored AI agent loops and repeated context re-sends are driving the overrun, and lays out how intelligent model routing can cut inference costs while keeping most of the quality frontier models deliver.
A renewal quote arrives and the board asks whether it is time to switch ITSM platforms. Incumbents call migration too risky, challengers call it painless, and neither answer is worth trusting. Drawing on churn poll data and five factors, from data and integrations to change management and contract terms, this article sets out where the real difficulty sits and how to avoid ending up back where you started.
A quarterly service review showed first-contact resolution at ninety-one percent, until a site engineer admitted he fixes most things before they ever reach the system. The real culprit isn’t the workflow or the ITIL practice, it’s the per-agent license nobody treats as a process decision. This article looks at how licensing shapes what gets recorded, and what to check before your next renewal.
ITIL 4’s Business Analysis Management practice takes an organization from a vague problem to a justified, costed solution. Stakeholder needs get sorted into utility, warranty, and experience before two processes turn them into an agreed approach and a recommended option. The business analyst now sits inside the product team as often as beside it, and owns requirements for the life of the solution.
