Elevating the IT Service Management Experience

Problem today

IT service desk management (ITSM) workflows are overly manual and cumbersome.

Nearly half (47%) of office workers still use the phone to contact the service desk — one of many pressure points for IT support.

Consider that Ivanti’s study finds office workers interact with the service desk 3x per month. When these interactions are manual and inefficient — as with phone contacts — it places an undue burden on IT. Nearly 1 in 4 IT professionals (23%) say a colleague has resigned due to burnout.

Your frontline service desk employees need relief.

Why it matters

Automation can dramatically optimize workflows, drive efficiency for IT professionals and reduce IT burnout … all while maintaining or improving employee experience.

Yet a large portion of organizations don’t use it. Today, just 46% use service desk ticket automation, and only 41% automate onboarding.

The service desk is hungry for these types of solutions! 95% of IT professionals call automations “very” or “somewhat necessary” to be efficient at their jobs.

What does service desk automation do?

• Automates common service requests and workflows such as password resets, basic troubleshooting and onboarding of new employees.
• Uses intelligent ticket routing to categorize and assign tickets based on experience and expertise or resolve tickets automatically with no human input.
• Deploys automations, scripts and knowledge management to up-level help desk skills and speed throughput.
• Figures out where proactive solutions can reduce overall ticket traffic — solving future problems that have not yet entered the ticket queue.

Problem today

Companies lack an integrated IT tech stack to oversee and optimize service desk performance and experience.

Without integration, data is stuck in silos, and critical insights remain inaccessible.

For example, today only 53% use real-time user or telemetry data to manage digital employee experience (DEX) — a big missed opportunity. IT teams need access to telemetry data across systems, applications, users and devices to make data-driven, informed decisions.

Why it matters

When companies integrate their IT tech stack, they can uncover powerful insights and deploy time-saving automations.

Visibility is table stakes for optimizing help desk performance. Beyond visibility, an integrated tech stack unleashes opportunities for automation and service improvements: intelligent ticket routing, automated workflows, improved service delivery.

Your IT teams want this. Among IT professionals, 1 in 3 say their organization doesn’t have the right tools to proactively remediate end-user issues.

The end goal: Make the service delivery process manageable and scalable.

Rethink — and dramatically broaden — the role of ITSM within your organization.

I view ITSM as a center of gravity within the organization. It’s important that CIOs move away from thinking of ITSM as a ticketing system. It is much, much more. Think about the new-hire experience, for example. ITSM automates their onboarding, manages the employee’s assets, tracks their experience and ensures they are getting the right services.

Now, let’s think about how this works at the organizational level. Your ITSM tracks assets, manages tickets‌ and analyzes the performance of the IT environment. All of this generates massive amounts of information: data about products, devices and users — ‌piles of telemetry data. We gather that information and let it flow through different platforms and tools — all from ITSM — and let those insights inform decision making, drive automation‌ and power workflows and services.

By integrating various IT functions into ITSM, organizations can create a more cohesive and efficient IT environment, ultimately leading to improved employee satisfaction and productivity. ITSM is essentially the focal point of how you will manage IT going forward.

Leverage AI and automation to reduce the IT workloads and make service management more efficient.

At Ivanti, we’ve developed a series of automations around ticket processing, categorization, routing and remediation — and we’ve seen dramatic impacts.

By routing tickets to the right group in seconds — not minutes or days — we are speeding up the help desk triage process. And now we’re taking it a step further by using AI to identify what can be remediated automatically and immediately, without a human intervening in any way.

A simple example of this is letting employees reset their own passwords using a bot. And another more interesting use case is that Ivanti now uses an AI to comb through our internal knowledge base and ticket history and identify where a particular problem has occurred before. Then, the AI looks at whether a patch or some other remediation can be applied to fix the issue — all done automatically. These types of autonomous interventions are driving great productivity gains, which lets us use freed-up help desk resources to focus IT productivity in other areas.

Define which DEX metrics are most important for IT to measure and optimize.

To optimize service delivery and improve overall ITSM experience — IT leaders should focus on these areas:

• Telemetry data: Key telemetry indicators include device age, processor speeds and battery degradation. Tracking these empowers IT to address potential issues quickly, even before the employee is aware of an issue.
• Support-related measures: The number of open incidents — and whether this variable is trending up or down — is critical. Time to resolution and effort scores (i.e., ease of getting help and reaching a solution) are also helpful to gauge the effectiveness of IT support.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): CSAT scores are a priority metric to track and manage customer interactions with the service desk.
• Application performance: Load times and errors are vital metrics for mission-critical applications.
• Security metrics: Vulnerability scan data and anti-malware version information are important for maintaining a strong service posture.

With this information, IT teams can make informed decisions about how to improve outcomes — whether by automating a workflow to speed up resolution times or using intelligent ticket routing to ensure complex issues are assigned correctly to an individual with the right expertise.