Your License Model Is Quietly Choosing Who Gets To Log Work
A quarterly service review showed first-contact resolution at ninety-one percent, until a site engineer admitted he fixes most things before they ever reach the system. The real culprit isn’t the workflow or the ITIL practice, it’s the per-agent license nobody treats as a process decision. This article looks at how licensing shapes what gets recorded, and what to check before your next renewal.
ITIL 4 Business Analysis Management Explained
ITIL 4’s Business Analysis Management practice takes an organization from a vague problem to a justified, costed solution. Stakeholder needs get sorted into utility, warranty, and experience before two processes turn them into an agreed approach and a recommended option. The business analyst now sits inside the product team as often as beside it, and owns requirements for the life of the solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.