ITSM Articles

Illustrated woman at a desk with a laptop and stack of books, surrounded by swirling colourful shapes representing ideas and creativity

Blogging Tips for ITSM Professionals (Plus How to Use AI Effectively)

With free AI tools now available to make writing easier (and quicker), it seems a good time to share blogging tips to help get “the people who know about ITSM” writing. Rather than relying on those who don’t (but who are happy to use the AI tools to create ITSM content anyway).
Colored padlocks representing Security Stories used to design secure services in ITIL (Version 5)

Designing Security into the Product & Service Lifecycle with Security Stories (ITIL (Version 5) & Agile)

Most teams still bolt security on at the end, then act surprised when the audit goes badly. Alex Harding makes the case for Security Stories, negative “what if” scenarios written from the attacker’s viewpoint and dropped straight into the backlog, so security gets designed in rather than retrofitted. A practical look at how the technique maps onto ITIL (Version 5) and where it earns its keep in the design stage.
Unified endpoint management shifting IT operations from reactive to proactive

From Reactive ITSM to Proactive IT Operations: The Role of Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)

More investment, more automation, more AI, and yet ticket volumes refuse to fall. Akshaya argues the reason is that none of it touches the layer where most tickets actually start: the endpoint. A look at how unified endpoint management shifts IT from cleaning up failures to preventing them, and why the organizations doing it run their service desks at a fraction of what their peers spend.
Agentic AI in ITSM removing human judgment and increasing operational risk

Agentic AI in ITSM: Why Removing Human Judgment Increases Risk

Mathies Wähner on why Agentic AI fails in ITSM. Drop it into an operating model that isn’t ready and it doesn’t make you smarter, just faster at being wrong, while removing the people who used to catch the mistakes. The real question isn’t how to implement it, but whether your operating model can survive it.
SITS26 Recap: Key ITSM, AI, and Service Management Insights

SITS26 Recap: Key ITSM, AI, and Service Management Insights from London    

SITS26 brought together ITSM leaders, practitioners, and vendors to explore the future of AI, automation, change management, digital employee experience, and service transformation. Here are some of the biggest lessons and practical takeaways from this year’s event in London.
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. 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, which is exactly why no new wave of tech has managed to kill it. If anything, 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 somehow adds another layer of complexity instead. Rui Alves argues that bolting AI onto a tangle of disconnected systems just gives you automation without intelligence, and that 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. A practical checklist for what AI-ready operations actually require.
How ITSM Supports Compliance Management

How ITSM Supports Compliance Management and Audit Readiness

Compliance evidence is usually assembled from scattered systems, but one source often hides in plain sight: your ITSM platform. Mahati Dwibhashi of ManageEngine shows how change records, access approvals, incident logs, and asset data, captured as a byproduct of daily operations, double as audit evidence for frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. She covers where ITSM stops and security tools take over, and the small workflow tweaks that make the data audit-ready.
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.