Service Desk Articles

Robot scanning a QR code, representing self-service IT help desk support via QR codes

5 Innovative ITSM Best Practices That Transform Your IT Help Desk

Most IT help desks stop at ticket resolution and leave the rest of the ITSM platform underused. Drawing on customer conversations and internal use at Desk365, this piece lays out five practical ways to push further: QR-code support requests, cross-department automations, AI-generated tickets from meeting notes, a single source of truth, and narrowly trained AI agents. Small changes, real gains in efficiency.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Illustrated phoenix rising in flames, representing renewal and rebirth in the ITSM tool renewal cycle

ITSM Tool Renewal Guide: 7 Questions to Ask Before Renewing or Replacing Your Platform

Too many ITSM tool renewals get treated as procurement exercises when they should be strategic decisions. Manish Sharma lays out a 90–180 day framework for evaluating your current platform, assessing alternatives, and building stakeholder alignment before contract renewal. The guide also covers the seven questions every IT leader should answer to decide whether to renew, expand, or replace their tool.
Illustrated IT support agent at a computer with headset, representing AI-driven service desk operations in a ticketless enterprise

The Ticketless Enterprise: How AI Agents Prevent Work Instead of Processing It

The best support tickets are the ones never submitted. Shankar Gomathi argues that with AI agents in the mix, a ticketless enterprise is closer than most support teams think, letting IT operations become more effective and less expensive. The article covers what a ticketless model looks like, which categories of ticket disappear first, and what has to be true internally to reach that state.
ServiceTeam ITSM Enterprise 3.0

Provance ServiceTeam ITSM Enterprise 3.0

Provance ServiceTeam ITSM Enterprise 3.0 is a Microsoft-native service management platform built on Microsoft Power Platform, combining ITIL-aligned capabilities with low-code flexibility, workflow automation, and integration across Microsoft 365, Azure, Power BI, and Power Automate. This solution snapshot covers where the platform fits, who it’s built for, and how it compares against traditional ITSM tools.
Illustrated figure measuring with a large ruler, representing flow metric measurement in IT service management rather than just SLA use

SLA Compliance is Misleading: How to Measure True IT Service Health

SLA metrics capture resolution and response times against fixed targets. They’re aggregate, they’re historical, and they tell you nothing about internal flow quality. A team can optimize for the clock while the way they get there, through escalation ping-pong, midnight heroics, and workarounds instead of fixes, degrades the system underneath. Yuri Kudyn on what to measure instead if you care about true service health.
Why service management keeps outliving its ITSM is dead obituaries

ITSM is Dead? Why Service Management Keeps Outliving Its Obituaries

Somebody announces the death of service management every few years, and they’ve been doing it for 35 years now. Barclay Rae has heard every version and thinks they all miss the same thing: the job at the heart of service management is human, not technological. That’s why no new wave of tech has managed to kill it, and AI has made the case for it stronger.
CTO checklist for building AI-ready IT operations in 2026

The CTO Checklist for AI-Ready IT Operations in 2026

Every new tool promises to simplify IT operations and adds another layer of complexity instead. Rui Alves argues bolting AI onto disconnected systems just gives you automation without intelligence, and the CTOs getting real value in 2026 are doing the unglamorous work first: connecting service management, monitoring, assets, FinOps, and governance into a single operational layer.
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, treated as long-held IT support best practice. But given how much the business now depends on technology, that list is showing its age, and it’s likely getting in the way of something more useful to the organization. This article makes the case for the VIR list as its replacement.
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, she pastes the error into an AI tool and gets a fix in seconds. Problem solved, but no incident recorded. Judin Joan Soundarya S of ManageEngine looks at what shadow AI costs problem management and security operations, and how ITSM platforms can regain visibility.