ITSM Articles

Illustration of an old-fashioned balance scale weighing two people, symbolizing how service management measures the value of people

Service Management Still Doesn’t Value People Enough

James Finister has spent a career in service management and now works on AI ethics, and his argument is that the industry still doesn’t value people enough. In episode 11 of Conversations with Giants, he makes the case for governing AI honestly and early, designing work around the people you have, and remembering that SIAM is about relationships and trust, not just the contract.
Illustration of an overwhelmed, cluttered office with tangled cables and scattered papers, representing legal and operations workflows before extending ITSM discipline

How to Extend ITSM Frameworks to Legal and Operations Teams: A Step-by-Step Guide

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) brings proven ITSM practices to legal and operations teams. This guide explains how to build service catalogs, create effective request workflows, set realistic SLAs, automate repetitive tasks, and improve visibility without sacrificing professional judgment.
Illustration of workers building a stone foundation labeled "Service Management Foundations" beneath towers reading "Scaled AI" and "Operations," representing the architecture needed for the intelligent enterprise

Service Management Architecture: The Missing Foundation for AI and the Intelligent Enterprise

AI can only be as effective as the service management environment that supports it. This article explains why service management architecture, rather than tools alone, provides the operational foundation needed for AI, Agentic AI, and intelligent enterprise transformation.
Person looking through binoculars with two portraits in the lenses, representing perspective in service management

Why Service Management Is a Human Behavior Problem

Service management frameworks describe what people should do and rarely explain why they don’t. Maarten Bordewijk has spent 30 years arguing that the problem is behavioral, not procedural. In episode 10 of Conversations with Giants, he makes the case for founding the discipline on behavioral science, explains why AI raises the value of human judgment, and gives his blunt verdict on the new ITIL.
Three IT team members arguing during an outage, illustrating vendor blame in multi-vendor outages

When Three Different Vendors Each Say the Outage Isn’t Their Fault

When three vendors each report a different timeline for the same outage, none of them are necessarily wrong, and none of them add up to what happened. This article looks at why multi-vendor outages are becoming the norm as cloud infrastructure consolidates around a handful of providers, why vendor timelines rarely match, and why the only thing an organization fully controls is its own independent incident record.
Man looking anxiously through a window, representing the risk of facing an SPLA audit unprepared

Microsoft Audits Hosting Providers Every Other Year Now, and Most Have No Governance Plan

Nearly half of Microsoft hosting providers surveyed by SAMexpert were audited or verified within the past twelve months, a rate higher than researchers expected. Most run SPLA without a dedicated owner, and 47% have no audit governance plan at all. Alexander Golev and Daryl Ullman break down what separates providers who can prove their compliance position from those whose confidence has nothing behind it.
Abstract illustration of a digital service ticket moving through space, representing agentic AI automating IT service desk workflows.

Agentic AI in ITSM: 5 Ways Agentic AI Is Transforming the IT Service Desk

For 30 years, the ticket ran the IT service desk: submit, log, triage, resolve, close. Agentic AI in ITSM is retiring that model, executing fixes across systems rather than drafting them for a human to click through. There are five places IT leaders get this transition wrong, from inflated agentic claims to the governance gap most vendor decks skip entirely, and why the ticket itself may not survive the shift.
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.
Crowded marketplace of software storefronts, illustrating the range of vendors buyers must choose between beyond the Gartner Magic Quadrant

Most Software Buyers Misuse the Gartner Magic Quadrant

Most buying committees treat the Gartner Magic Quadrant as a product ranking, and Keith Andes, a former Gartner analyst, says that’s not what it measures. He walks through what the two axes represent, why leadership position doesn’t equal best fit, and where Gartner Critical Capabilities and the five-step BuySmart process come in once you’ve built a shortlist.
X-ray style illustration of a person's head overlaid with circuitry, representing IT asset visibility for cybersecurity

You Can’t Secure What You Can’t See: Why IT Asset Management Is the Foundation of Cybersecurity

You can’t secure what you can’t see. ITAM gives IT teams real-time visibility into who owns every device, what happens to assets during onboarding and offboarding, and how ready they truly are for an audit – closing the gaps that turn into costly incidents.
Database server locked inside a metal cage, representing data control under on-premises ITSM

Seven Signs On-Premises ITSM is Still the Right Call for Your Organization

Cloud ITSM often makes sense, until it doesn’t. The article sets out seven concrete situations, air-gapped networks, sensitive CMDB data, data sovereignty, latency-sensitive change control, total cost of ownership, audit evidence, and vendor lock-in, where an on-premises ITSM tool deployment is the better fit. If two or three apply to your organization, it argues, cloud may not be the safer default it’s assumed to be.
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.