ITSM Articles

Illustrated figure on a flying carpet soaring over a futuristic city representing the independent journey of introducing ServiceDesk Plus to Iran

ServiceDesk Plus in Iran: Never an Official ManageEngine Partner, but Two Decades of Building the Market Anyway

Before ManageEngine and ServiceDesk Plus meant anything in Iran, Hadi Ahmadi was already making the case for it, one skeptical meeting at a time. Blocked from an official partnership by sanctions on contracts, payments, and licensing, his team trained IT staff and built Persian content anyway. This article is a firsthand account of educating a market for a brand that never signed them on.
Illustrated IT workers carrying heavy fragmented loads through a server corridor representing increased ITSM work levels after AI adoption

AI is Helping ITSM Teams. So Why Does the Work Still Feel Heavier?

SolarWinds surveyed 844 IT professionals for its 2026 State of ITSM report, and the results cut two ways. Eighty-four percent said AI met or exceeded ROI expectations, saving close to nine hours a week on detection, support, and triage. Yet 52% said overall workload increased, driven by new work maintaining integrations, validating outputs, and training staff. Outcome-based measurement separates the two groups.
Illustrated desk scene with a stained official document representing a service failure caused by an erroneous death report

When the System Works and the Service Still Fails

Mark Patnaude’s wife learned she was dead – not metaphorically. An erroneous Social Security record triggered a five-week ordeal that exposed a truth every technology leader should sit with: systems can perform exactly as designed while the service they deliver still fails the customer entirely.
Colourful illustrated workflow diagram with connected nodes representing a custom Slack ticketing workflow

How to Build a Custom Ticketing Workflow Inside a Slack Channel

Most Slack-based support isn’t a service desk; it’s a search bar and good intentions, and every untracked request is a governance issue waiting to surface. Taylor Halliday walks through building a real ticketing workflow with two channels, Slack’s Workflow Builder, and an emoji status board, then lays out exactly which pains mean you’ve outgrown the hack and need a dedicated tool.
Abstract illustrated network of interconnected nodes overlaid on human silhouettes representing agentic AI governance and multi-agent systems

Agentic AI Governance: How Do We Govern What We Didn’t Design?

Agentic AI systems build responses nobody specified in advance, and traditional governance models weren’t built for that. Jon Stevens-Hall draws on complexity thinking, from Cynefin to LLM-as-judge testing, to ask what it takes to govern behavior that develops rather than behavior that’s designed, and why loosening control in the right places might be the only way to keep it.
Abstract illustrated stacked data layers in blue and red representing the AI agent data layer foundation for ITSM trust

Before You Trust an AI Agent, Trust Your Data Layer

Salil Kulkarni, CSIO at Virima, argues that when an AI agent gets overridden, the issue is rarely the model. It’s a data layer that’s stale, incomplete, or missing the context a human would have caught. Drawing on decades leading technology at Caesars, Las Vegas Sands, and in hospitality revenue management, he sets out four conditions a data layer must meet before an AI agent can be trusted to act.
Illustrated figure standing at a crossroads between a stormy chaotic landscape and a calm structured one representing ESM adoption choices

Want Better ESM Adoption? Stop Suggesting ESM

Matt Beran’s advice is blunt: never suggest ESM. He argues that IT teams jump straight to the framework and the acronym before another department has finished describing its actual problem, and that this is what turns a useful idea into an initiative people resist. His case is to help departments examine their own work first, let them own the solution, and let ESM show up without ever needing the name.
Illustrated four-quadrant grid with whimsical characters representing the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Platforms

The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms: What Changed Between 2022 and 2026

Gartner brought back the Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms after retiring it in 2022, and the vendor map looks very different. Freshworks jumped from Challenger to Leader, displacing Ivanti to Niche Player, while Halo and TeamDynamix arrived as new Challengers. These magic quadrant moves say more about market momentum than product fit, and the 2026 report has plenty to offer.
Two professionals on a large screen in a vast digital archive room representing fragmented service management and the Conversations with Giants interview with David Cannon

Service Management Has Outgrown the IT Department

Service management has outgrown the IT department. Technology is now chosen and managed across the organization, often outside IT, and the specialized tools and teams around it have stopped joining up. David Cannon argues that the valuable work has shifted from running the IT service desk to orchestrating and governing the whole picture, and that cloud holds a lesson for anyone planning AI.
Illustrated young professional with glasses interacting with a digital interface representing hiring for potential over experience

Hiring for Potential: Why I Gave a Senior Engineering Role to an Intern Instead

Hiring for potential rather than tenure led Michael Privat to offer a senior engineering role to an intern rather than a more experienced candidate. He argues that years of experience became a reliable hiring signal only because access to knowledge was once scarce and slow to build, a condition AI has now largely erased. What predicts performance today, he says, is adaptability, curiosity, and a willingness to take ownership of a problem without a playbook, qualities a résumé’s years-of-experience line doesn’t capture. His case is that hiring processes still screen candidates out on tenure before any of that gets a chance to show.
Illustrated warehouse piled with laptops and boxes representing untracked shared device handoffs in ITSM

Bridging the Gap Between ITSM Records and Physical Device Handoffs

Shared devices don’t always track their handoffs the way ITSM tickets suggest. A device marked “resolved” can still be sitting uncharged in the wrong place, with no record of who took it or when. This article looks at why that gap exists, what a connected smart locker workflow can look like, and how to pilot the fix before scaling it across locations.
Illustrated robot multitasking at a desk with documents and notes representing ITSM AI agent data overload

Your ITSM AI Agent Isn’t the Problem – Your Data Is

ITSM AI agent pilots that dazzle in the demo but stall in production are usually blamed on the AI model. The article’s author, a ten-year ServiceNow veteran, argues that the real issue is the CMDB beneath it: incomplete, duplicated, and poorly governed data that any AI agent inherits as its own weakness. Before offering four steps to close what he calls a skills gap, not a technical debt problem.
Abstract digital cube with floating interface panels representing free Gartner Magic Quadrant and analyst reports for ITSM

Get the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms for Free

The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms is out, and with it a fresh crop of vendor-gated links to track down. Sophie Danby has rounded up every free ITSM-relevant analyst report she could find, from Gartner and Forrester to IDC, covering everything from AIOps and endpoint management to privileged access.
Illustration of a person deep in thought surrounded by abstract, colorful imagery, representing reflective experiential learning in ITSM

The Business Case for Experiential Learning in ITSM

The Uptime Institute puts the cost of a major outage above $100,000 for most organizations, and the biggest cause isn’t ignorance. It’s staff not following procedure under pressure. Training doesn’t fix that alone. This article works through where an experiential learning component belongs in the budget, what the evidence supports, where it stops, and the two objections that come up every time someone asks for the money.
Robotic and human hands sharing a ship's wheel, representing human oversight of AI services

AI Is a Service Too: Why ITSM Still Matters in the Age of AI

AI may automate incidents, requests, and knowledge management, but it also becomes a service that requires governance, accountability, and human ownership. Discover why service management remains essential in an AI-driven future and why trust depends on more than intelligent technology.