2022 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management

Published 26 October 2021 - ID G00739529 - 36 min read

By Chris Matchett, Rich Doheny, and 2 more

The digital workplace is evolving with demographic shifts and uncertain environments that rewrite the rules on IT service management. This roadmap describes five factors that I&O leaders must address to be an effective enabler of ITSM within the enterprise of 2025.

Overview
Key Findings
Many IT service management (ITSM) teams find their ways of working to be incompatible with the agile methods of DevOps and product teams.

Overreliance on introspective operational metrics — rather than user experience (UX), productivity measures and business outcomes — is hampering innovative improvement initiatives.

Employees directly contact peers and product teams for support, bypassing the classic tiered structure of their IT service desk.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation investments for ITSM tools seldom deliver anticipated value due to poor data and process maturity.

Recommendations
I&O leaders focused on infrastructure, operations and cloud management must:

Federate ITSM practices within product teams and centers of excellence to complement agile approaches.

Shift how I&O assesses the value it provides to staff by using service experience metrics to better understand the employee’s perspective on I&O performance.

Align IT support to the digital workplace by evolving the IT service desk to support a hub that facilitates collaboration, peer support and direct connections to product teams.

Unlock AITSM capabilities, including AI and automation functions, by optimizing ITSM practices first and then plan for continual hands-on curation.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2024, 80% of ITSM teams that have not adopted an agile approach will find that their ITSM practices are ignored or bypassed.

Introduction
This strategic roadmap covers key components of a three year vision to optimally utilize developing practices and technology to deliver value for the evolving business needs of ITSM.

The following research presents key considerations to include in your own strategic roadmap for ITSM, running from 2022 to 2025. It is not necessary to do everything at once before 2025. Even partial attainment will raise the I&O organization’s maturity level and speed up its evolution toward supporting digital business. Take sufficient action to position your ITSM practices as an enabler of
digital business, instead of a bottleneck.

Figure 1 provides an overview of this strategic roadmap.

Figure 1: 2022 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management

This document outlines the five visions of the optimal future state, then the current state of those same topics. These are followed by a gap analysis assessment, and finally a migration plan featuring recommendations for I&O leaders to migrate the gap from current to future state.

Returning readers should see “Note: Updates to the 2019 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management” at the end of this report.
The top five areas that I&O leaders must focus on to achieve the optimal 2025 vision for ITSM are:

ITSM Practices Are Federated to Allow Product Teams to Deliver Effective Services

ITSM Embraces Digital Employee Experiences

Metrics Measure IT Service Experiences

IT Service Desks Reorganize as Hubs for Swarming and Lean Workflows

AITSM Permeates ITSM Tools and Practices

Future State
ITSM Practices Are Federated to Allow Product Teams to Deliver Effective Services
The ability of the product teams (see An I&O Leader’s Framework for Product Management) to enable competitive advantage requires autonomy to pursue the most promising opportunities. As each product team matures, they will move from interfacing with the ITSM teams for the management of incidents and changes to executing the practices themselves. This transition of execution in a
federated environment requires careful planning to ensure that the quality of service is maintained (or preferably improved) across both the traditional application environment and the product teams.

Ensuring effectiveness across the environment requires a focus on enabling the product teams to deliver the necessary levels of service. One way to achieve this is with the instantiation of the agile service delivery office (ASDO). This ITSM center of excellence will work closely with the product and platform teams, (through, for example, communities of practice) to ensure that the product
teams are independent and able to deliver a high quality of service. The principle responsibility is to provide a supporting framework to both the product teams and the traditional ITSM teams that support the waterfall-based environment. Both have the same objectives of delivering and planning for effective services, but each entity requires a different approach (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Relationship Between ITSM Teams and Product Teams

First and foremost, the ASDO will provide an ITSM consultancy service to the product teams to integrate them with the production environment and assist in the development of the necessary competencies and capabilities to, for example, manage their own incidents and changes. The consultancy supports the teams with a consistent, standard and repeatable approach to ITSM practices and
helps them understand and manage service risk. The ASDO will enable organizational leaders to ensure that the teams are capable of undertaking the responsibilities and will support their ability to do so (see Autonomy Through End-to-End Accountability (Standard Bank)).

Effective service delivery requires monitoring and measuring to understand patterns and trends, and the ASDO will measure the effectiveness of the two modes of operation. This will include monitoring key practices (i.e., managing incidents and changes) against quality of service indicators (see above for IT service experience) as well as planning for the future to increase adaptability, stability
and resilience of the production environment.

The quality of the services will be achieved with a service excellence function that has two responsibilities:

Coordinated management of the production environment to ensure that support is available for cross-product changes and major incidents that span multiple environments, for example.

Provide visibility into service performance across environments and guidance for teams falling outside accepted service standards to improve service delivery.

Finally, the ASDO needs to maintain a service strategy that continually monitors innovation, culture and new technology to improve the relevance and value of ITSM practices.

While the move to a more federated environment creates new challenges, the introduction of the ASDO will ensure that the transition can be managed effectively, with increased service delivery agility and resilience.

Related Current State: The Agile Dilemma

Return to Future State

ITSM Embraces Digital Employee Experiences

I&O’s embrace of digital employee experience management (DEX) drives deeper engagement with the consumers of IT’s services to ensure that these services are delivered in a way that consistently meets the needs of the various supported personas (see Tailor Your IT Service Desk Support Based on Business User Personas). To accomplish this, service management functions must evolve
traditional continual service improvement approaches to put processes and technologies in place to listen to employees, monitor performance and deliver new or enhanced experiences based on the application of that information (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: An Iterative Approach to Improving Digital Employee Experiences

I&O will leverage multiple quantitative and qualitative voice of the employee (VoE) measures to listen to the consumers of their services. This is used to challenge IT-centric misconceptions around who the business consumer (see Glossary) is and support the requirements’ analysis of what “good” looks like. I&O evolves sentiment collection using newly designed surveys, focus groups and
one-on-one interview questionnaires — as well as next-generation DEX tools that aggregate performance and usage data from endpoints, contextual sentiment from employees about the use of technology and organizational context from workplace analytics.

That information is analyzed and visualized to better define employee personas and journey maps, and ensure alignment with the business value statements defined in the strategic goals. This stage is critical, as it ensures that any new services or service improvement plans will align with their consumer’s needs and improve the overall IT delivery to the business.

The focus on digital employee experience management will drive continual change within IT to deliver optimized business outcomes. This will have a broad impact on service delivery, including new technologies, user experiences and multiexperience improvements, training, awareness programs, process reengineering and gamification.

Related Current State: Service Improvement Lacks Focus on Experience

Return to Future State

Metrics Measure IT Service Experiences

Service experience metrics take a business-centric approach to metrics design — as opposed to the traditional IT-centric approach adopted by I&O leaders for many years, as shown in Figure 4. SXM will assist I&O leaders to identify impediments to the service experience.

Figure 4: Traditional ITSM Metrics Versus Service Experience Metrics

Examples of service experience metrics are displayed in Table 1.

Table 1: Examples of Service Experience Metrics

Metric Description

Balanced A multidimensional category of metrics that creates more meaningful observations by assigning equal importance to efficiency, productivity
Triangle and satisfaction.

Business Value Set of metrics that measure the performance of I&O key success factors that influence or contribute to business outcomes.
Metrics

XLAs XLAs measure the end-to-end employee experience when consuming corporate IT services and focus on employee productivity and
engagement.

Anti- Anti-dissatisfaction tracks consumer or customer sentiment moving from a dissatisfied state back to neutral — mainly used in the context of
Dissatisfaction IT service desk support (see Start Measuring IT Service Desk Anti-Dissatisfaction).

Customer Effort A customer service experience metric that measures customers’ perceptions of how easy it is to handle interactions and achieve issue
Score resolution during service and support requests.

Service Level SLI is a business-focused measure designed to highlight issues with the health of the service.
Indicator (SLI)
SLO is a target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by an SLI that is usually measured over a fixed period (usually
Service Level monthly).
Objective (SLO)

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

SXM will leverage user experience and business objectives as key elements of metrics design (see Design and Deploy ITSM Key Performance Indicators and Metrics That Support Business Services and Observe, Measure and Assist: Three Emerging Ways to Drive Digital Workforce Dexterity). SXM will vary depending upon business unit activities and objectives. As an example, the SXM for
development may differ from the SXM for sales because technology dependence, utilization and service performance expectations vary. SXM provides a service, product or business unit perspective — rather than IT, end-user or transactional focus. SXM is not expected to have dynamic targets, common among ITSM metrics. This is because targets for SXM are usually defined by business
expectations, unlike traditional ITSM metrics which are internally defined and hence need adjusting over time. As I&O organizations mature, their focus shifts from ITSM metrics to SXM to deliver on business expectations (see Tell an IT Value Story That Matters to Business Leadership).

SXM governance involves business leaders or their representatives. Business relationship managers have a key role in designing SXM. Under-achieving SXM targets will trigger corrective action plans by I&O leaders. The corrective action plans will include all of the I&O stakeholders that are responsible for the service experience.
Related Current State: Traditional ITSM Metrics Do Not Represent Business Expectations

Return to Future State

IT Service Desks Reorganize as Hubs For Swarming and Lean Workflows

To satisfy the demand for more immediate responses to support critical business services and evolving products, I&O leaders are facing increasing pressure to diagnose and resolve incidents more quickly. IT service desks will be working alongside IT and business departments, utilizing agile approaches that require rapid and lean support workflows. Remote and hybrid working
has accelerated these trends, which highlight the increasing unsuitability of the classic tiered structure to IT support 1 (see Redesigning Work for the Hybrid World for more information).

Younger business consumers demand more flexible ways to engage with IT for support and assistance. 1 At the same time, the median age of the workforce is getting older, as fewer people aged under 25 join the workforce and experienced employees work past regular retirement age. 2, 3,4
 This requires ITSM strategies that support an increasingly diverse user-base.

IT support workflows will no longer be dictated by tiers (Levels 1, 2 and 3) that can delay response and action on complex incidents. Instead, IT service desk hierarchical escalation models will be complemented by a collaboration hub (see Figure 5). A collaborative hub enables business consumers to post questions into a place where answers come from a mixture of IT service desk experts,
technical experts, product teams, business process experts or peers and colleagues.

Figure 5: IT Service Desk Collaborative Hub

The system of record for IT support should be an ITSM tool with inbuilt or integrations to collaboration capabilities (see Critical Capabilities for IT Service Management Tools), but the user interface aspect also could be fulfilled using dedicated collaboration tools underpinning established communication forums. Examples of collaborative tools currently include Microsoft Teams, Slack,
StackOverflow, Facebook for Business, Discord, Reddit, Quora, wiki or discussion forum (see Technology to Support Collaboration for a Hybrid Workforce). IT service desk analysts will work with champions to moderate and guide employees toward solutions, conversations, peers and experts — instead of just assigning tickets to support queues and chasing them up when asked. Incident
management becomes more fluid and responsive, and provides direct access to product support teams where DevOps is utilized for systems of innovation (see What Is Gartner’s Pace-Layered Application Strategy and Why Should You Use It? for an explanation of systems of innovation).

Service desks will be able to focus on higher-value interactions — telephone, live chat, walk-up support desks and roaming agents — because simple, repetitious issues and requests are handled via automation (or avoided altogether). Level 0 support channels, such as self-service and peer-to-peer support (see “IT Service Desk Tier Structures Cause Slow Support” in the current state section
of this document for more information on the current tier model). These will address the needs of the business consumer quickly, without a human service desk agent. Such channels include self-service, peer-to-peer support and virtual support agents (see 3 Simple Ways IT Service Desks Should Handle Incidents and Requests).

Where live agent interaction is still required or preferred, analytics will enable AI to augment, rather than replace, the IT service desk experience (see “AITSM Permeates ITSM Tools and Practices”).

Related Current State: IT Service Desk Tier Structures Cause Slow Support

Return to Future State

AITSM Permeates ITSM Tools and Practices

As demands on I&O organizations grow, I&O leaders are seeking opportunities to automate and provide more proactive management of their environments. This will be important for larger and more advanced I&O organizations that can feed large machine- and human-generated structured and unstructured datasets into the tools.

AITSM refers to the application of context, advice, actions and interfaces of AI, automation and big data on ITSM tools and optimized practices to improve the overall effectiveness, efficiency and error reduction for I&O staff (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Four Domains of AITSM

For more detail on these domains, including examples, please refer to Leverage 4 Domains of AITSM to Evolve ITSM Tools and Practices.

Leading ITSM tools and related products will support all four domains, and successful I&O leaders in 2025 will have harnessed the benefits of these technical evolutions by first optimizing ITSM practices. Technical initiatives, such as automation and virtual support agent solutions, won’t fail for them because they do not need to manually and extensively script scenarios. These I&O leaders
understand that AITSM requires quality data from which to learn, predict and react. As a result, their road to AITSM was built on a foundation of practice optimization.

Related Current State: AI for ITSM Deployment Is Limited to Technical Solutions

Return to Future State

Current State
I&O leaders are currently reacting to the pandemic’s outcomes in the workplace and its resulting squeeze on budgets and resources. This is driven by longer-term impacts such as the spread of hybrid and remote working, and the need to keep innovating. This current state section reflects how many I&O leaders are experiencing circumstances that can eventually lead to the future state as
described above.

The Agile Dilemma

The advent of agile and the evolution of product teams creates a dilemma for many ITSM organizations. 5 Their ITSM practices are written for a different age where the focus is on warranting the stability and resilience of the production environment. For many, this has created a risk-averse approach to IT service management with a “one size fits all” mentality and lack of focus on speed of
delivery.

Unfortunately, this creates tension with DevOps and Product Teams, as they recognize the need to comply with audit requirements for managing the production environment, but find that the pace of the traditional organization is incompatible with their needs. Furthermore, the lack of automation, the “command and control” governance model and the process-centric approach can result in many
product teams disengaging with ITSM teams and creating and managing their own ITSM practices (also called “shadow IT,” see Glossary) with no reference or integration with the ITSM teams.

This can lead to a split in how the production environment is managed — especially as the ITSM practice owners may have little visibility in how the practices are run by the product teams. Many clients report that this lack of focus has resulted in a deteriorating quality of service, with more major incidents and a general drop in overall service standards. Product teams may be unaware of
practices that can improve service delivery quality and accommodate the speed of change that their customers demand.

Related Future State: ITSM Practices Are Federated to Allow Product Teams to Deliver Effective Services

Return to Current State

Service Improvement Lacks Focus on Experience

I&O leaders struggle in establishing a sustained approach to driving high-quality experience outcomes in the services they provide. While common ITSM frameworks like ITIL have emphasized the provider-customer relationship and the need to focus on outcomes, most organizations approach digital employee experience as a series of siloed initiatives, rather than adopt a cohesive strategy.
Additionally, for many ITSM initiatives, the focus on digital employee experience management simply captures transactional customer satisfaction survey results for their service desk. While this can provide valuable feedback for the organization, it is only focused on a narrow subset of users (i.e., those who contact the IT service desk) and a limited set of engagements (i.e., live support for
incident resolution and request support).

Rather than experience outcomes and customer journeys, operational metrics are still often the key drivers behind service improvement initiatives. Assumptions of what is “good” are based on industry averages and benchmarks which can risk prioritizing the wrong investments and, in some cases, costly overdelivering of services. I&O leaders have also notoriously adopted a one-size-fits-all
approach to planning for and delivering services to their customers. Rather than running segmentation exercises and developing personas to map to service catalog entries, knowledge articles and support channel offerings, these services are built for mass consumption.

While most will agree that there are benefits to evolving ITSM practices to support a digital employee experience management strategy when pressed for business justification and ROI to maintain investment, collaboration and overall enthusiasm, I&O leaders struggle. However, a siloed approach to digital employee experience in ITSM that is rooted in traditional metrics rather
than business value will fail to maintain momentum in the long term.

Related Future State: ITSM Embraces Digital Employee Experiences

Return to Current State

Traditional ITSM Metrics Do Not Represent Business Expectations

IT Score data for I&O 6 highlights that “monitor I&O performance” is rated the lowest maturity activity (2.1 on a scale of 1 to 5) out of the 25 activities that contribute to I&O maturity. Traditional ITSM metrics primarily focus on service management process efficiencies. While the service management processes by themselves may work efficiently, metrics used to track the same may not clearly
highlight challenges in the service experience faced by business consumers (see Start Measuring IT Service Desk Anti-Dissatisfaction). Because of the primarily operational focus of traditional metrics, they are inadequate to represent the complete service experience availed by business consumers. Hence, these metrics are not fit for consumption of business unit leaders, or possibly even IT
management.

Traditional ITSM metrics do not necessarily trigger a call to action. This is mainly because these metrics are presented and consumed by I&O staff at a very operational or tactical level of the I&O organization. Hence, any slippage in metrics performance does not necessarily lead to corrective action plans to be set in motion.

The biggest challenge with the conventional way of measuring ITSM performance is that it does not demonstrate how ITSM practices support business activities and enable business outcomes. I&O leaders are also fascinated with industry averages and “benchmarking” ITSM metrics without factoring aspects like I&O maturity and business objectives of their industry peers. This further reflects
that, too often, ITSM teams are more focused on following rules and appearing successful, rather than maximizing business value from the use of information technology.

Related Future State: Metrics Measure IT Service Experiences

Return to Current State

IT Service Desk Tier Structures Cause Slow Support

IT service desks currently operate the same tier-based structure as they have for at least 20 years (see Figure 7). Phone and email are still the most common contact methods offered, but many employees use the IT service desk as a last resort. Before turning to the service desk, they search the internet, ask colleagues (peer support) 7 or use their own applications and equipment (known
as shadow IT). Furthermore, self-service takeup has grown during the pandemic. 8

Figure 7: Typical Tier-Based IT Service Desk Structure

This tier-based model forces all employees to always contact the IT service desk first for official support. Incidents are triaged manually at Level 1 by service desk analysts, who attempt a first-contact resolution by searching a knowledge base or following a script. Overemphasis on KPIs also causes analysts to prioritize their performance metrics over business needs. Issues that routinely
require involvement from Level 2+ teams are delayed, while the upper tiers hold the ticket. Employees circumvent formal support processes because the inflexible structure wastes time and effort for both IT and business, and they try to contact IT professionals and peers directly. This bypasses the tier structure that was intended to deal with low-level IT issues without distracting senior
technicians and staff from their primary responsibilities. This is also less compatible with DevOps and product teams, as they need to operate on rapid response and devolved control.

Related Future State: IT Service Desks Reorganize as Hubs for Swarming and Lean Workflows

Return to Current State

AI for ITSM Deployment Is Limited to Technical Solutions

ITSM tools demonstrate capability in the context domain of AITSM by storing metadata about people and products, but can less commonly use that information to automate advice or take action directly (see Leverage 4 Domains of AITSM to Evolve ITSM Tools and Practice). In the IT service desk context, virtual support agents do little more than apply NLP through a conversational platform to
carry out a targeted search of the knowledge base or other explicitly previously scripted actions (see Innovation Insight for Virtual Support Agents). Many I&O leaders are happy with that as a way to deflect simple and/or repetitious queries and requests before escalating complex interactions to IT support live chat — but these solutions are either very basic or expensive to run when aiming for
extended benefits. Some forward-looking I&O leaders have begun investigating AITSM capabilities beyond virtual support agents (see “AITSM Permeates ITSM Tools and Practices” above and also Automate Incident Response to Enhance Incident Management).

Most I&O leaders that purchase AI and automation technologies for ITSM achieve limited value because sufficient data and process maturity foundations have not been established.

Related Future State: AITSM Permeates ITSM Tools and Practices

Return to Current State

Gap Analysis and Interdependencies

Achieving an optimal ITSM state by 2025 will be a significant but challenging achievement for the I&O leader. I&O leaders still focused on establishing success in core ITSM practices in 2022 will not meet all of these goals within the next three years. However, even partial success will set the foundation for further growth. I&O leaders looking to be best-in-class and able to meet the challenges
set by digital business should plan to meet or exceed these goals. There is, however, one important caveat: Only implement improvements that provide benefit to your organization at a sensible cost, as agreed upon with business leaders.

Tables 2 to 6 below show the key Gartner IT Score for I&O activities and their respective objectives that are required to be in place to fully deliver on each of the five scenarios defined in the future state section above. These tables report the current average scores according to Gartner’s IT Score for I&O assessment benchmark 9 and also the level of maturity required for each, along with the
key attainment that explains why that level of maturity is necessary. I&O leaders should refer to IT Score for Infrastructure and Operations to evaluate their current attainment and use the resulting report to build an improvement plan in these and other areas.

For example, the target optimal state of digital employee experience (see Table 3) requires the “Articulate Customer Needs” activity of the Gartner IT Score for I&O objective “Evaluate, Plan & Design” to be at Level 5. The maturity improvement framework states that “Engage business stakeholders in a continual, iterative manner” is a feature of progressive organizations at maturity level 5. The current average, as
of September 2021, for that activity is 2.8. This example demonstrates a significant gap between the current average and optimal state.

Each table in this section is followed by selected other requirements. I&O leaders should ensure that these additional dependencies are handled in their improvement and migration plan.

These targets should be interpreted as indicative of the gap between now and what will be required to achieve the future state scenario. We do not recommend putting all efforts into getting to the target numbers as the sole way of reaching the goal.

Table 2: IT Score Gap Analysis for Agile Service Delivery Office

2021
Gartner IT Score for Target
Activity Average Necessary Feature
I&O Objective Maturity
Maturity
 2021
Gartner IT Score for Target
Activity Average Necessary Feature
I&O Objective Maturity
Maturity

Measure and Optimize IT Service 2.8 5 Optimize I&O processes for product delivery, and adopt lean
Optimize Management Processes techniques for optimized process management

Transition & Operate Transition Services 2.8 5 Adopt agile practices in collaboration with the business
IT Services

Transition & Operate Provide Service 2.7 5 Institute a service management office
IT Services Governance

Plan and Manage Build Effective Teams and 3.4 5 Promote and reward agility in teams
I&O Talent Culture

Manage the Function Develop I&O Strategy 3.3 3 Create forward-looking plans for resources and technologies
of I&O

Manage the Function Design and Evolve 3.4 5 Organize teams around service products and/or business goals
of I&O Organizational Models

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

ASDO will also require:

At least one product team utilizing DevOps and/or agile principles, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to be used as a support model for at least one product or service.

IT service experience metrics (see Table 4).

Table 3: IT Score Gap Analysis for Digital Employee Experience

Gartner IT Score for I&O 2021 Average Target

Activity Necessary Feature
Objective Maturity Maturity

Evaluate, Plan & Design Articulate Customer Needs 2.8 5 Engage business stakeholders in a continual,
iterative manner

Measure and Optimize Align I&O Metrics with 2.7 5 Incorporate end-user satisfaction into service
Business Goals delivery

Plan and Manage I&O Build Effective Teams and 3.4 4 Create a culture that encourages innovation and
Talent Culture risk-taking

Manage the Function of I&O Develop I&O Strategy 3.3 5 Use customer indicators to change infrastructure
strategies

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

DEX will also require IT service experience metrics to be implemented (see Table 4).

Table 4: IT Score Gap Analysis for IT Service Metrics

2021
Gartner IT Score Target
Activity Average Necessary Feature
for I&O Objective Maturity
Maturity

Evaluate, Plan & Establish Service- 2.5 5 Tie performance metrics to both I&O and business outcomes, and revise
Design Level Expectations performance metrics continuously to reflect business needs

Measure and Monitor I&O 2.1 4 Use operational metrics to support business planning
Optimize Performance
 2021
Gartner IT Score Target
Activity Average Necessary Feature
for I&O Objective Maturity
Maturity

Measure and Align I&O Metrics 2.7 4 Measure business or end-user satisfaction periodically
Optimize With Business
Goals

Transition & Provide Service 2.7 5 Create business value dashboards to demonstrate value and trends
Operate IT Governance
Services

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

Table 5: IT Score Gap Analysis for IT Service Desk

Gartner IT Score for I&O 2021 Average Target

Activity Necessary Feature
Objective Maturity Maturity

Transition & Operate IT Support IT Services 3.0 4 Focus on improving business user
Services productivity

Plan and Manage I&O Talent Develop Employee Skills and 2.9 3 Develop employee’s soft skills
Competencies

Plan and Manage I&O Talent Build Effective Teams and Culture 3.4 2 Define teams and encourage
collaboration

Manage the Function of I&O Develop I&O Strategy 3.3 3 Update strategy to address evolving
business needs

Manage the Function of I&O Design and Evolve Organizational 3.4 4 4: Support self-organizing teams
Models
3: Collaborate based on expertise

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

IT service desks with a collaborative hub will also require:

A collaboration tool that is either part of — or integrates with — the ITSM tool.

IT service desk analysts who are trained in community moderation and engagement (see Table 5).

Business leadership that supports and encourages collaborative behavior in all employees.

Table 6: IT Score Gap Analysis for AITSM

Gartner IT Score for I&O 2021 Average Target

Activity Necessary Feature
Objective Maturity Maturity

Measure and Optimize Optimize IT Service Management 2.8 3 Formally document cross-functional
Processes responsibilities

Measure and Optimize Automate Operations 2.4 5 Incorporate artificial intelligence into
automation

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

AITSM will also require:

An ITSM tool with full AITSM capability in all processes, or an add-on product that provides this to the ITSM tool (see Table 6).

ITSM-related processes that are sufficiently documented for script automation.

Knowledge management that is sufficient enough to provide context for AITSM processes to produce valuable advice.
Migration Plan
The prioritized steps shown in Figure 8 will enable I&O leaders to move toward optimal ITSM in 2025.

Figure 8: 2022 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management Timeline

Source: Gartner (October 2021)

Higher Priority
I&O leaders should carry out the following actions between now and the end of 2022:

Refocus your approach to ITSM with a support framework to enable the DevOps and product teams to help them practice service management. Build close working relationships (e.g., through Communities of Practice) and focus on their requirements. Remove unnecessary process steps and bureaucracy, create adaptable practices by addressing lingering “one size fits all” approaches and
ensure that there are effective KPIs and associated service reviews in place.

Develop a federated approach, whereby the execution of core ITSM practices like IT Change Management is performed by the product teams with little involvement from the associated ITSM practitioners. Market the value and expertise of ITSM to the product teams and create a compelling proposition as to why ITSM still has a role to play in meeting business outcomes. This can be
achieved by illustrating how ITSM practices create a standard, consistent and repeatable way of delivering value. Bear in mind that many product teams have little experience in the production environment and are looking for support and expertise in helping them achieve autonomy — especially in delivering the desired business value. Do not assume that the product teams will naturally
approach the ITSM teams, especially if ITSM (and more pertinently, ITIL), is seen as old fashioned, slow and bureaucratic.

Optimize ITSM practices for AITSM by identifying pockets of work that are standardized and repeatable enough to be eliminated or automated. Humans can carry out high-value cases to an extended degree (i.e., turning an error-message diagnosis into a training opportunity). This leveraging will be made possible without increasing staff numbers because the low-value interactions are dealt
with by an automated process, or — even better — never need to be managed (see 3 Simple Ways IT Service Desks Should Handle Incidents and Requests).

Adopt balanced triangle metrics to present a multidimensional view of the IT services delivered by I&O. Balanced triangle metrics will prevent a skewed interpretation of the service performance measures with a consistent focus on customer satisfaction (see Multidimensional Approach to Metrics to Measure and Report on I&O Quality, which offers further detail on the balanced triangle
method).

Leverage existing internal best practices and techniques for employee experience management by partnering with the HR and other stakeholders leading employee experience efforts. This cross-functional approach will both improve time to value for ITSM by utilizing existing competencies, and support corporate goals of improving overall employee experience as a way to attract and retain
top talent.

Medium Priority
I&O leaders should carry out the following actions by the end of 2023:

Develop business value metrics representing the performance of key I&O activities that have a direct impact on business outcomes or business success. Partner with business relationship managers to communicate and plan corrective action plans that ensure business value metrics are aligned to expectations of business units. If I&O service delivery is outsourced, engage partners to
commit to XLAs for service delivered by them.

Facilitate direct contact between business consumers and product teams, ensuring that the ITSM tool is either used to record the interaction, or updated by whichever tool the product team uses. Leverage omnichannel support interfaces such as IT support live-chat, collaboration tools and peer support to bring support resources from I&O, applications and the business into the workflow as
close to the source as possible. Train IT service agents in swarming support practices and community moderation within collaboration tools. Transition from tiers to cloud or swarming models to eliminate losses in cycle times (see Embrace DevOps Product Teams to Turbocharge Your I&O Organization and Control Costs).

Instantiate an Agile Service Delivery Office to provide a supportive framework for the ITSM practices and the emerging requirements of the product teams. The ASDO will support and enable the transition to a federated operating model, maintain an overview of service quality and manage across environments with key practices, such as cross product changes and major incidents
(see Modernize ITSM to Meet the Demands of DevOps and Product Teams).

Collaborate with the business to create an end-to-end visualization of key employee experiences with I&O through employee journey maps. Pilot this approach with common journeys, such as service desk interactions, and expand to more critical priorities and challenges that your organization is trying to address. Use this journey data to identify improvements in service delivery (see Ignition
Guide to Designing Employee Journey Maps).

Invest in sentiment analysis capabilities and more inclusive digital experience management DEX tools that integrate with ITSM tools for improved transparency and insights-driven automation for self-healing. Adopt IT service desk anti-dissatisfaction metrics and Customer Effort Score (see Start Measuring IT Service Desk Anti-Dissatisfaction).

Implement SLO and SLI metrics to define and measure pragmatic service level expectations in partnership with business stakeholders (see Assessing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Principles for Building a Reliability-Focused Culture). Develop XLAs to measure the timeliness and effectiveness of consuming IT services.

Lower Priority
I&O leaders should carry out the following actions by 2025:

Deploy AIOps tools and integrate them with the AITSM capabilities of advanced ITSM tools to achieve a full cycle of observability, service experience and automation. Track new practices and technologies (such as AI, automation and agile practices) and assess what actions are required to meet the continuing demands as leading vendors continue to innovate. Adjust for either ITOM/ITSM
suites or add-on products for the best fit as the market evolves. Keep up to date by following the Critical Capabilities for IT Service Management Tools, Market Guide for AIOps Platforms and other Innovation Insights.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

Business An internal end-user of services (typically an employee). This is similar but not the same as the customer role. Unlike a customer, a
Consumer business consumer is not responsible for helping to define a service nor agreeing to the service levels and costs of such. Business
 consumers use the service that has been defined for them, and have no direct power to change or replace that service — except
by asking the customer to do so on their behalf.

Shadow Refers to IT devices, software and services outside the ownership or control of IT organizations (see Embracing and Creating
IT Value From Shadow IT).

Evidence
1
 Gartner’s 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey on workers’ technological and workplace experience and sentiment was also carried out in 2017 (n = 3,120) and 2019 (n = 7,261). The same question about support preferences was asked in these earlier studies. In 2017 and 2019, 11% of participants selected “Use internal IT self-serve mechanism (like a FAQ)” as in their top three
preferences. This figure rose to 21% in the 2020 study. The percentage of participants choosing this option as their first-choice rose from 2% and 1% in 2017 and 2019, respectively, to 11% in 2020.
2
 Statistics on the working-age population and labor force from 2011 to 2019 collected by the International Labor Organization shows the total global workforce increasing in volume, but decreasing for age groups below 25 and increasing for all other age groups from 25 to 65+.
3
  Latest Trends in Worker Demographics, NCCI. Latest trends in worker demographics from the [US] National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) shows that between 2009 and 2019, the labor force grew at every age group except under 25. Workers 65 and older increased from 6.5 million to 10.7 million, a 63% increase. The labor force from age 25 to 44 and age 45 to 64 grew as
well, but each declined as a share of the labor force due to the rapid increase of workers 65 and older. Americans under 25 declined both as a share of the workforce and in absolute terms.
4
  Demographic Change in the World of Work, University of Lüneburg. A study by Leuphana University Luneburg has further data on the aging of the workforce in Europe and Asia.The European Commission (2017) projects an increase in the employment rate for older workers in Europe from 55.3% to 67.9% in 2016 to 2070, respectively. Moreover, the share of older workers in the European
workforce will respectively rise from 16.8% to 21% from 2016 to 2030. The rise in employment rates for older workers aged 55 to 64 is especially high in countries like Greece, with a rise of 30.2%, Spain with 22.6% and Italy with 19.7%.

Among Asian countries, Japan and China will be particularly affected by the demographic change and are projected to face a large increase in the share of those aged 65 and above, compared to those between 15 to 64 years (old-age dependency ratio). By 2070, the old-age dependency ratios of China and Japan are expected to reach 53.3% and 69.6%.
5
 300% increase from 2019 in client calls requesting support and advice in managing the relationship between ITSM and agile/product teams.
6
 IT Score for Infrastructure and Operations benchmark data across 516 I&O organizations points to maturity score of 2.1 (on a scale of 1 to 5) for “Monitor I&O performance” activity. IT Score for Infrastructure and Operations shows a score of 2.5 for the Measure and Optimize objective against an importance score of 3.2 (n = 516 I&O organizations).
7
 Gartner’s 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey. Gartner conducted a consumer study to understand workers’ technological and workplace experience and sentiment. The research was conducted online during November and December 2020 among 10,080 respondents from the U.S., Europe and APAC. Participants were screened for full-time employment, in organizations with 100 or
more employees and required to use digital technology for work purposes. Ages range from 18 through 74 years old, with quotas and weighting applied for age, gender, region and income, so that results are representative of working country populations. This study included the question, “If you had an issue with the digital technology you use for work, how would you prefer to solve it?”
Participants chose up to three options and then ranked them. This revealed the top three and first-choice preferred support methods.
8
 The 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey consumer study on workers’ technological and workplace experience and sentiment revealed that the age of the survey respondent often impacted their preference of support channel. Thirty-seven percent of respondents aged 18 to 25 indicated “look for an answer on the internet” as one of their top three options when compared to 24% of those
aged 55 or older. They were similarly more likely to choose virtual assistants, chatbots and walk-up support. Fifty-five percent of respondents aged 55 or older opted to choose phone and email (49%), whereas for those aged 18 to 25, only 30% and 25% would choose those methods. Other support channels such as “ask a co-worker” and live chat did not show any significant variance on
popularity based on the age of the respondent.
9
 IT Score for Infrastructure and Operations (n = 516 I&O organizations).

Note: Updates to the 2019 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management

Some topics no longer feature in this new roadmap for the purpose of a tight focus on the most impactful issues — not because those topics are no longer important. None of those factors have become out of date or superseded by new approaches. The following list describes the topics from the 2019 Strategic Roadmap for IT Service Management that are not featured in this research, along
with an explanation of why they could not fit here:

People-focused ITSM has evolved into other coverage of product teams. The 2022 roadmap references this concept in ways that are more direct to ITSM.

Recommended research: An I&O Leader’s Framework for Product Management.

Service asset and configuration Management (SACM) continues to be at the forefront of maturity and improvement focus for I&O leaders. The latest developments around cloud-focused SACM strongly align with the coverage of federated ITSM practices in the 2022 roadmap, and thus was not included as a separate topic here.

Recommend research: Don’t Let the Cloud Ruin Your CMDB

Service planning and acceptance has fallen out of focus and attention by I&O leaders. It remains a foundational aspect of ITSM best practice, but there have not been any recent developments on the matter. We did not observe I&O leader demand for a stand-alone research on this topic beyond general agreement that the message was sensible.