Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 31 | Page 14

LATEST INTELLIGENCE AUTOMATION, AI, AND ANALYTICS: REINVENTING ITSM BOTH WHITEPAPERS PRESENTED BY Download whitepaper here E xecutive Introduction EMA research consistently tracks IT service management (ITSM) as a hub of digital transformation and change. What’s new are the ways artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and analytics are redefining ITSM’s role in business innovation, services, and organizational reinvention. Although potentially game-changing, these advances are not challenge-free. Technological complexity, functional understanding, resource allocation, and simple resistance to change all exert a drag on adoption. Part of the challenge comes from confusion around the technologies themselves, since vendors and practitioners often use terminology at will for very different functions. Automation: Service organizations look for ways to exploit the value of AI bots, virtual agents, and a range of analytics-driven automation within the context of existing investments in ITSM platforms, 14 INTELLIGENTCIO systems, workflows, IT processes, and automations already in place. AI and analytics: The broad scope of AI crosses topics such as virtual agent bot-like automation, AIOps, machine learning (ML), predictive advice, and big data lakes. Without a clear understanding and adoption path, ITSM teams are often too reluctant to trust and maximize the potential of AI. EMA designed this research, “Automation, AI, and Analytics: Reinventing ITSM,” to investigate the relationships between the near-universal business demands of digital transformation and the wealth of enabling technologies as they converge on the widening discipline of ITSM. Starting with the service desk as a central point of departure, the research took a use- case look at the state of AI and predictive analytics advances applied to incident and request service, problem resolution, support automation, and broader levels of enterprise service management (ESM). n www.intelligentcio.com