How AI will Transform IT Service Management

Remember ‘Jarvis’ from Iron Man or ‘Irona,’ the Robot Maid from Richie Rich? Well, if you do, then you already had a glimpse of the shrewd adroitness of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Artificial Intelligence or, what we call machine intelligence is all set to create an unprecedented phenomenon shortly. The rate of its progression has been swift, dramatic and very real, and as Elon Musk said: “It is capable of vastly more than anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.” Artificial Intelligence in the realm of IT, has a vast potential in developing and transforming the IT Service Management (ITSM).

How ITSM works

ITSM, in itself, is a broad spectrum connecting the dots between IT services and the end-users. It encompasses all the activities performed by an organization to design, create, implement, deliver, and manage IT services provided to its customers. ITSM employs several frameworks to meet its ends, ITIL being the most popular and preferred. ITIL CSI has come to be mainly in use for improving business. To understand ITIL, let’s look at its definition by Wikipedia.

“ITIL an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a set of detailed practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business.

ITIL describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists which are not organization-specific nor technology-specific, but can be applied by an organization for establishing integration with the organization’s strategy, delivering value, and maintaining a minimum level of competency.”

See, easy to define but hard to understand. Not everyone is a Tony Stark after all. So, we have tried putting this into an explanation for the many Steve Rogers, who only understand ‘English.’

Let’s, for example, take a restaurant. If the food and ambiance provided by the restaurant are equivalent to IT services offered by a company and employees catering to the customers are similar to ITSM, ITIL is the approach adopted by the restaurant in situations provoking customer dissatisfaction. To learn more about IT trends click here

Reactive vs. Proactive

The very first book written on ITIL was the service desk, a modified version of the help desk that was created to resolve issues and support its end users. The take was on Incident Management. The initial idea of a help desk or service desk was responding to a call from a customer detailing out the issue, the mere goal being user back up and getting the program somehow running. Moreover, it called for a reactive response, which means that one had to wait until the issues showed up.

As certain issues started appearing over and over again, a proactive response was called for. A dynamic reaction contemplated identifying the problem area and fixing it even before it occurred. Prevention is better than cure after all!

Thus emerged ITIL Problem Management on the screen. With automation and advancements like pattern recognition in technology, problems could be traced and fixed way before they have planned. So, we had technology that could foresee what is coming and report it to the human analyst for preventing it. What we intend on discussing in this article is what if it never had to be reported? What if technology could make it vanish?

Predictive analytics

Have you ever wondered how Amazon, Google, or Facebook know you better than your closest friend? From recalling the person, you stalked last year to remembering your sizes. They come up with word suggestions and content recommendations even before you have typed or searched for the information.

This Predictive Analytics, in the last few years, has been seen detonating under the name of ‘Big Data.’ Artificial Intelligence had already made its mark in the e-commerce and automobile sectors, much before IT embraced it. Can you imagine its scope in IT?

How AI will transform service management

Not long ago, did we even dream of automated cars, yet today we have them in reality. Artificial Intelligence escalated real quick optimizing itself and empowering others, along with its partners- Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Their efficiency is immeasurable. AI in ITSM will renovate the system in whole. Let’s look at some of the possible fields for its growth.

Incident management. A report by Pink Elephant states that 96% of the IT incidents are caused by changes made by IT, which means incidents are inevitable. That calls for rapid human action after every alteration. Lean defines incidents and incident management as ‘waste,’ dissipating time, energy, and resources. Wouldn’t it be great they were resolved automatically? Deploying AI in such locus can save IT employees from such routine tasks, not to mention its efficacy.

Problem management. The key to problem management is pattern recognition. Most of the AI systems, depend on sophisticated pattern learning to identify specific issues. With such advanced pattern recognition in ITSM, problems can be fixed by machines themselves way before they even surface.

Machine Learning. True Machine Learning, according to George Spalding, the Executive VP at Pink Elephant, is ‘still in its infancy.’ Even True Machine Learning neural network creators aren’t sure how it works, adds Spalding. ML bears the potential to optimize ITSM in unimaginable ways. The future of ITSM is brighter than the sun with its real advent.

Intelligent Chatbox for ITSM. “By 2020, the average person will have conversations with bots more frequently than their spouse”, according to Gartner. With Siri and Google Assistant in your hand, you already have a general idea about its capabilities. AI implementation in ITSM chatbots will have more natural automated support provided with a conversational user interface, while natural Language Processing (NLP) assists it to converse in several languages. Machine Learning will enable such bots to deliver real-time answers.

Increasing Productivity. A comparatively large number of companies, over the last few years, have adopted ITIL for enhancing their business. ITIL powered by AI will offer self-help as a smart option for its end-users, reducing Incident Management a.k.a. Ticketing, increasing customer satisfaction, accelerating business performance, and adding to the company’s productivity.

The advent of Artificial Intelligence is just about to cause global and phenomenal changes but has also put an end to limitations with the sprouting of vast and imminent possibilities. Not far from where we stand today, we can imagine a future shaped by machines.

About Author

Hutch Morzaria

I am an ITIL Expert and extremely passionate about customer service, customer experience, best practices and process improvement. I have led support, service, help desk and IT teams as well as quality and call center teams in Canada and the UK. I know how to motivate my teams to ensure that they are putting the customer first.

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