If you read the annual IT service management (ITSM) trends blogs, you’ll see various trends, such as artificial intelligence (AI), enterprise service management (ESM), and value creation. Each trend plays a vital role in evolving corporate ITSM capabilities, but how often are these trends – including experience management – tackled in isolation? Perhaps with one team focused on the opportunities of AI and another on selling the benefits of ESM to other business functions.
There is, however, much connective tissue between the various ITSM trends. For example, the corporate ESM approach will benefit from the sharing of AI capabilities that might have first been introduced in IT, with them extended to the service and support capabilities in other business functions.
Importantly, one trend ties all the other key ITSM trends together – experience management. This blog explains how.
Artificial Intelligence
While you might think that AI is about technology and experience management is about people, the two are closely linked. Or at least they should be. As with any new technology, AI shouldn’t be introduced just because the technology is available. Instead, AI’s introduction should be business-focused – on what makes the most significant difference to business operations and outcomes.
I know it’s an obvious thing to state, but it does quickly articulate the connective tissue between experience management and AI. For instance, that experience data highlights where issues and opportunities are to provide a focus for what’s most important in AI adoption. In baseball terms, experience management throws up the ball for AI to hit.
Examples of this include the following:
- Experience data reports what end-users think of existing IT services, allowing your IT organization to prioritize its ITSM AI investments on the things that will make the most difference.
- Even if AI investments are focused on “what matters most,” the changes might not deliver the expected improvements. For instance, AI could unintentionally degrade experiences. Experience data helps by measuring the end-user and operational impact of any new AI capabilities, allowing for course correction as needed.
- Experience data not only shows how well end-users are adopting new AI capabilities but also highlights where additional support or training is required.
- Experience data helps AI capabilities understand end-user preferences, pain points, and expectations, leading to better and personalized solutions.
- Experience data can predict the impact of planned AI-related changes, such as changes to ITSM workflows, roles, and responsibilities.
- Experience data facilitates predictive analytics, where AI capabilities can predict and address potential issues before they occur.
You can learn more about how experience management shapes AI initiatives in this blog by industry authority Roy Atkinson.
Value Creation
Experience management is not simply about making employees or end-users happier. This is now an old quote, but it’s still valid five years later; in 2019, Forrester Research stated that:
“…the most important factor for employee experience is being able to make progress every day toward the work that they believe is most important.”
Experience data might highlight employee happiness, but it also captures insights about employee lost productivity. Such that an IT organization can show how, by understanding what’s working and what isn’t and investing its improvements in the right places (which might be AI investments), it’s reducing employee lost productivity.
The focus on experience shows that IT prioritizes the right things for improvement and investment. And given the challenges that IT organizations have in measuring and communicating their value, it could be argued that experience data and insights can be used as a proxy for value, i.e., “look at how we’ve made employees more productive.”
Ultimately, experience data provides valuable insights into service performance, end-user behavior, and operations that allow IT organizations to improve decision-making and strategic planning, ideally with a laser focus on business value creation.
Enterprise Service Management
The ESM approach is the use of ITSM capabilities by other business functions to improve services, operations, experiences, and outcomes. For example, human resources (HR), facilities, and legal teams can improve their business value by using elements of what many ITSM teams already do using service management best practices and an ITSM tool:
- An HR department can benefit from proven knowledge management capabilities – from creating knowledge articles to presenting HR staff or employees seeking help with the most relevant information.
- A corporate legal team can better manage work intake and progress using self-service capabilities and workflow automation.
If an IT organization with an ESM strategy has already adopted experience management, it’s another capability that can be shared. If it hasn’t, the future introduction of experience management should also consider the opportunities for other business functions (as part of the corporate ESM strategy).
Hence, unlike the previous two ITSM trends, the connective tissue between experience management and ESM is about more than the effective use of experience data. Instead, there’s the “it’s bigger than IT” perspective to consider.
Ultimately, the IT organization isn’t the only corporate service provider facing employee demands for better experiences and outcomes, and when an ESM approach is taken, the optimization and standardization benefits of ESM are suboptimal without experience data. Employee issues can remain hidden and unaddressed, and the IT organization might even share “capabilities with issues” with other business functions. For example, the issues employees experience when using IT self-service capabilities. Another potential issue is that not sharing IT’s experience management capabilities further widens the service delivery gap between IT and other business functions.
While this blog is fewer than 1000 words, hopefully, it paints a picture of how experience management and experience data tie in with other key ITSM trends. In many ways, your IT organization’s investments in these trends will likely be suboptimal without the insights of experience data.
If you want to learn more about the use of experience management in optimizing the outcomes from these ITSM trends, please take a look at how the HappySignals ITXM platform can help.
