Articles tagged with ITSM

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.

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

Stephen Mann July 22, 2026

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 IT workers at old computer terminals facing a large AI creature made of cash, representing uncontrolled AI software spend in asset management

Asset Management Teams Are Being Asked to Govern AI Spend They Can’t See

Sophie Danby July 17, 2026

AI software is the fastest-growing cost in most IT estates, and most teams have no real view of it. The Flexera 2026 State of ITAM Report bears that out: AI tracking is now the field’s biggest challenge, wasted AI spend is climbing, and FinOps is closing in on territory IT asset management used to own. The piece runs through the findings that count for asset and service teams, and what to fix first.

Illustration of a bearded man looking puzzled beside a large number 5 and question marks, representing the ITIL 5 naming debate

ITIL 5, ITIL v5, or ITIL (Version 5)? What Are People Actually Calling It?

Stephen Mann July 16, 2026

PeopleCert calls it ITIL (Version 5), but Stephen Mann ran a LinkedIn poll to see what ITSM practitioners really call it, and the official name came in third. ITIL 5 took 41% of the vote, ITIL v5 pulled 26%, and the branded name only 22%. Stephen looks at why the shortcuts are winning, and why the official name probably won’t catch up.

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

Jeff Hume July 15, 2026

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.

Olympic rings illustration with small AI robot agents standing beside them, representing agentic AI coordination in ITSM

What ITSM Can Learn from the Olympics in the Agentic AI Era

Nisha Ravi July 14, 2026

The Olympics demonstrate that success depends on teamwork, preparation, governance, and seamless coordination – not individual talent alone. Discover how these same principles help IT organizations deploy Agentic AI successfully through better context sharing, AI governance, continuous validation, and clearly defined AI responsibilities.

Two grain silos on a farm, each displaying a portrait, representing silos in IT service management

Simplicity, Service, and the Discipline of Asking Why

Sophie Danby July 8, 2026

Christian Nissen spent four decades in IT service management and helped shape ITIL along the way. In his Conversations with Giants episode, he makes the case that the industry keeps isolating capabilities it should be reintegrating, that it has swapped service for product, and that the skills worth learning are older and plainer than newcomers expect. Here are the ideas practitioners can use now.