3 ITSM Trends We're Seeing

IT Service Management (ITSM) is not a new concept; it's been around for quite some time. Atlassian has been playing in this space since 2015 (by my recollection...) with Jira Service Desk (JSD). As an Atlassian Solution Partner and the JSD Partner of the Year in 2017, we have helped hundreds of organizations adopt JSD to modernize their approach to service management. The following are a few trends we have seen over the past few years.

Total Addressable Market

Even though ITSM isn't new, it is definitely a hot topic, especially as the world is shifting to a remote workforce. The Total Addressable Market (TAM) is an estimate of how large the potential customer base is. I've seen estimates that have this market more than doubling in the next five years. From the Atlassian perspective, JSD has continued to be their fastest-growing product, coupled with the largest TAM. As a professional services organization that helps customers not only adopt the tools, but helps them through the complete transformation in the organization, we are very excited about these trends. We continue to invest in our processes and tools to better help organizations make this shift.

As a consumer looking to invest in this area, this trend bodes well for you, too. Specifically:

• Tool Choice – We prefer JSD, but there are a lot of great options out there.
• Partner Choice - You should be able to shop around for partners and find the right fit for your organization.
• Rapid Adoption - This is the number one reason we prefer JSD, because we can have a fully-functional ITSM solution deployed in weeks, not months.

ITIL

Great technology movements, like ITSM, are inherently coupled with frameworks that help to define best and common practices – ITIL is that framework for ITSM. We generally come across three types of engagements:

Rigid ITIL

We find that very large and/or highly-regulated organizations lean towards a more strict following of ITIL. The good news is that JSD has several (not all) of the ITIL-certified processes natively out of the box. To bridge the gap to a full -ITIL-certified methodology requires Atlassian Marketplace Apps and some effort by our ITIL-certified consultants. We don't generally push for this approach, but if it is an organizational requirement, we help our clients reach compliance.

ITIL-ish

We find many organizations that use ITIL as a foundation, and then modify or completely abandon some of the ITIL processes. This can be very effective when trying to create a process where none had existed previously. We will take the ITIL process and start with that as a baseline. Modifying that baseline should be very intentional and have a good reason for variation.

We also find that organizations with very long, historical processes (like change management) will use ITIL as the lens to challenge the existing process. It really helps to loosen the "well we have always done it that way" mentality.

No Framework 

For those who don't want to subscribe to a framework and just want to get something done, it is very easy to do in JSD.  Out of the box, JSD is very powerful and has a lot of great default behavior. Couple that with unlimited extensibility of Jira, and you can have JSD configured to however you want to work.  That is the powerful thing about Jira and JSD; the tool does not force a certain methodology on your team, rather you configure the tools to how your team works.

Enterprise Service Management

My last blog was on Enterprise Service Management (ESM), so I won't go into it too much here. The key point is bringing the service management piece of ITSM to everyone. Why is IT the only organization that gets to have their requests (I'm locked out, my laptop is broken, etc.) come through a nice customer portal and worked on in an orderly queue? Bring this power to your legal team (please review this NDA, I need an MSA, etc.) or your HR team (onboard a new person, change my address, etc.), or any team in the organization!

This is one of the most exciting areas for us, because 99% of the time, this does not require a new, large investment in software.  Most ESM teams we work with already have Jira, JSD, and Confluence in their organization...the hard part is done, the software is already purchased and functional! We get to come in and help these teams become so much more efficient and organized, and it's a lot of fun introducing new technology to teams that didn't realize how much technology could help their daily work efforts.