ITSM Articles

From VIPs to VIRs

From VIPs to VIRs: Rethinking IT Support Prioritization for Business Impact

Many IT service desks still operate with a “very important person” (VIP) list (after all, it’s a long-held IT support best practice). However, given the importance of technology to business operations and outcomes, the VIP list is showing its age. And more importantly, it’s likely getting in the way of something more useful to your organization. Does your IT service desk need a VIR list?
AI, Transformation, and What Comes First

AI, Transformation, and What Comes First

Every few years, the IT industry settles on a new savior. Agile. Then DevOps. Now AI. The pattern, as Kaimar Karu sees it, is that organizations adopt each one without first knowing what they want from it, and then act surprised when the results don’t live up to the hype. In this episode of Roman Jouravlev’s Conversations with Giants series, Kaimar covers the iron curtain still sitting between ITIL and DevOps, why the ITIL guiding principles are a net rather than a recipe, why AI should never be the goal in itself, and the skills technology won’t easily replace.
How Problem Management Transforms ITSM

From Firefighting to Prevention: How Problem Management Transforms ITSM

IT support teams often spend all their time reacting to issues – resetting passwords, restoring services, responding to issues (incidents), and managing major incidents such as outages. In this article, learn how problem management helps eliminate root causes, reduce repeat incidents, lower costs, and shift IT from firefighting to prevention.
The Compounding CMDB

The Compounding CMDB: How Executive Decisions Reduce IT Outages

Most organizations overestimate what a single CMDB “transformation” can do and underestimate the power of a stream of small, compounding design and automation decisions. This article explains the benefits of the latter over the former.
AI Terms in ITSM

5 AI Terms Every ITSM Practitioner Should Know in 2026

Read any ITSM platform brochure today and the same cluster of AI terms stares back: agentic AI, AI agents, RAG, AIOps, MCP. The vocabulary is moving faster than most IT teams can keep up with. Raghav S of ManageEngine explains what each one means in an ITSM context, how they differ, and how to tell which capability fits a problem you have rather than treating the buzzwords as a checklist.
Are You Delivering Value?

Are You Doing Service Management, or Delivering Value?

Value is what the customer decides it is, not what the IT department or a framework says. It’s the test Stuart Rance has applied across a thirty-year career: would anyone on the receiving end say your work created value for them? In episode three of Conversations with Giants he explains why he hates tool replacement projects, why the guiding principles were ITIL Practitioner’s most important contribution, and why using agentic AI to cut headcount is the wrong use of the technology.
ITSM Operating Model Blocking AI Adoption

Your ITSM Operating Model Is Blocking AI Adoption

If AI is the strategic priority, why are the teams meant to implement it still buried in ticket queues? John Mathieu of Allari argues the blocker isn’t culture, skills, or tooling, but the operating model itself: reactive work and AI project work compete for the same people, and reactive always wins. His fix is bifurcated execution, separating the two into distinct streams with protected capacity, so AI initiatives stop drifting toward urgency.
What ITSM Can Learn from Uber

When is a Service Not a Service? What ITSM Can Learn from Uber

This article takes my less-than-stellar experience with Uber and considers it through an ITSM lens. Hopefully, it might also make you think about the services your IT organization offers and delivers, and how they are perceived by your end-users/customers.
When ITIL Meets Developer Culture

When ITIL Meets Developer Culture: Why ITIL Fails Without Shared Understanding

When Askar joined as a Developer Experience (DevRel) consultant at one of Kazakhstan’s largest banks with 700+ engineers, he expected the usual challenges: stakeholder alignment, change resistance, legacy tooling. What he didn’t expect was to watch a mature ITIL 4 implementation quietly fail to deliver what it promised.
Service Management Maturity Models: A Practical, Evidence-Based Approach

Service Management Maturity Models: A Practical, Evidence-Based Approach (Pros, Cons, & Framework)

This article explores the role of maturity models in Service Management and ITSM – what they do well and where they often fall short – and introduces a more practical approach your organization can adapt to drive meaningful improvement.
Shadow AI in IT Support

Shadow AI in IT Support: When Employees Fix Problems Outside the Service Desk

It’s 9am and a sales manager hits a VPN error before a client call. Rather than wait on a service desk ticket, they paste the error into an AI tool and get a fix in seconds. The problem is solved, but no incident was recorded. Judin Joan Soundarya S of ManageEngine looks at what shadow AI costs problem management and security operations, and the practical ways ITSM platforms can regain that visibility without slowing users down.
Agentic ITSM

Agentic ITSM: Understanding the 4 Levels of AI Maturity in IT Service Management

Everyone is selling agentic AI, but the gap between the weakest and strongest versions is enormous. Manish Sharma of Rezolve.ai sets out a four-stage maturity model for AI in ITSM, from legacy retrieval through reactive assistants and process agents to true agentic systems that reason, act across connected systems, and catch problems nobody asked them to look for. He also offers the questions to put to any vendor claiming agentic AI.
The ITSM Industry’s Repeating Failure Pattern

The ITSM Industry’s Repeating Failure Pattern

For over 20 years, ITSM has repeated the same failures. Through ABC cards, Paul Wilkinson reveals how culture, leadership, and behavior – not tools or frameworks – consistently derail success. As AI becomes the latest “shiny new thing,” the question remains: why hasn’t the industry learned?
ITSM Tool Migration

ITSM Tool Migration: Common Mistakes Teams Make (and How to Avoid Them)

ITSM tool migration is inevitable. The ITSM tool landscape is constantly shifting. Products are sunsetted, licensing models change, companies merge and consolidate platforms, and organizations simply outgrow their ITSM tools. At some point, you’ll migrate ITSM tool, whether you planned to or not. This article will help you!
Where Did ITSM Evangelists Go?

Where Did ITSM Evangelists Go? And Why the Industry Needs Them Back in 2026

What happened to ITSM evangelists? Explore why they disappeared, the value they brought, and why the ITSM industry needs them more than ever in 2026.