Articles tagged with ITSM

Illustration of a person deep in thought surrounded by abstract, colorful imagery, representing reflective experiential learning in ITSM

The Business Case for Experiential Learning in ITSM

Henry Strouts August 21, 2026

The Uptime Institute puts the cost of a major outage above $100,000 for most organizations, and the biggest cause isn’t ignorance. It’s staff not following procedure under pressure. Training doesn’t fix that alone. This article works through where an experiential learning component belongs in the budget, what the evidence supports, where it stops, and the two objections that come up every time someone asks for the money.

Robotic and human hands sharing a ship's wheel, representing human oversight of AI services

AI Is a Service Too: Why ITSM Still Matters in the Age of AI

Hadi Ahmadi (Soroush) August 20, 2026

AI may automate incidents, requests, and knowledge management, but it also becomes a service that requires governance, accountability, and human ownership. Discover why service management remains essential in an AI-driven future and why trust depends on more than intelligent technology.

Person facing a calendar full of crossed-out days, illustrating technology as a blocker to getting help

Technology as a Blocker: What ITSM Can Learn from Healthcare

Stephen Mann August 17, 2026

A UK doctor’s practice pushes patients toward an online triage system instead of the phone, and the writer spends a week getting nowhere before a five-minute conversation with a receptionist gets the job done. The parallel to IT self-service and “deflection” is hard to miss. A look at what happens when technology shifts effort onto the person asking for help, and why that isn’t self-service at all.

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

Sophie Danby August 17, 2026

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.

Person looking through binoculars with two portraits in the lenses, representing perspective in service management

Why Service Management Is a Human Behavior Problem

Sophie Danby August 11, 2026

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

Judin Joan Soundarya S August 10, 2026

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

Sophie Danby August 6, 2026

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.

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

Ranjani Raghupathi August 4, 2026

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

Keith Andes August 3, 2026

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.

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

Monishka July 28, 2026

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

Konstantin Klyagin July 27, 2026

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

Sophie Danby July 24, 2026

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.