ITSM Articles

Illustrated robots and a human having a conversation over drinks representing conversational ITSM and AI agent collaboration

AI Agents: How to Add Conversational AI Without Replacing Your ITSM Platform

Many IT service desks are buried in password resets and status requests, and the usual response is a full ITSM platform migration. Aditya Santhanam argues for a cheaper route: wrap conversational AI around the ITSM tool you already run, so AI agents work inside existing records, SLAs, and rules. The article covers seven use cases, a six-step rollout, what to keep humans on, and the metrics that show it works.
Illustrated overflowing trash can filled with service tickets representing unresolved closure waste at the IT service desk

Fine-tuning Service Management Boards: How to Find the Waste Hiding Between “Resolved” and “Closed”

Most IT service desks can say exactly how long resolution took last month. Ask how long closure took, and the room goes quiet, because the SLA clock had already stopped by then. This article sets out six closure-stage patterns worth tracking, from zombie backlogs to calendar-driven closing, and how to redesign a Kanban board around aging and closure lag rather than the metrics resolution reports already cover.
Illustrated oil pump jacks and industrial smokestacks against a red sky with the Iranian flag representing ITIL adoption in Iran's oil and gas industries

ITIL: Best Practice or Business Necessity? Why Service Management Prevents Technology Waste

Iran is rich in oil and gas, yet poor governance has held its technology sector back. A MedaNet practitioner with two decades of ITIL experience there argues the real problem was never a shortage of equipment; it was buying systems without managing them. Drawing on work across banks, oil and gas, and petrochemical companies, the article sets out why ITIL matters as a discipline for using what you already own.
Illustrated gear shift with labels Record Route Assist Resolve Prevent representing the service desk automation outcome ladder

Service Desk Automation: How to Automate Resolution, Not Just Ticket Handling

An employee reports a dropped VPN connection, and every step of the IT service desk automation fires perfectly: intent read, ticket routed, history attached. The VPN still does not work. This gap between a well-handled ticket and a solved issue is the most common outcome in IT service desk automation today. The article maps a five-level outcome ladder and how to measure verified resolution instead of ticket volume.
Illustrated armored robots counting cash at a chaotic office desk representing runaway enterprise AI costs and budget overruns

Revamping Traditional IT Budgets: The Practical Fix for Exploding AI Spending

AI costs are spiraling across enterprises, and budgets built for predictable per-seat SaaS costs were never designed for open-ended, per-token inference. Erhan Giral of BMC Helix walks through why unmonitored AI agent loops and repeated context re-sends are driving the overrun, and lays out how intelligent model routing can cut inference costs while keeping most of the quality frontier models deliver.
Illustrated boardroom argument over a renewal decision representing the difficulty of changing ITSM platforms

How Hard Is It to Change Your ITSM Platform?

A renewal quote arrives and the board asks whether it is time to switch ITSM platforms. Incumbents call migration too risky, challengers call it painless, and neither answer is worth trusting. Drawing on churn poll data and five factors, from data and integrations to change management and contract terms, this article sets out where the real difficulty sits and how to avoid ending up back where you started.
Illustrated worker on a ladder painting a large 91 percent figure representing inflated first-contact resolution from ITSM licensing gaps

Your License Model Is Quietly Choosing Who Gets To Log Work

A quarterly service review showed first-contact resolution at ninety-one percent, until a site engineer admitted he fixes most things before they ever reach the system. The real culprit isn’t the workflow or the ITIL practice, it’s the per-agent license nobody treats as a process decision. This article looks at how licensing shapes what gets recorded, and what to check before your next renewal.
Illustrated business analyst in a suit holding documents amid abstract data spheres representing ITIL 4 business analysis management

ITIL 4 Business Analysis Management Explained

ITIL 4’s Business Analysis Management practice takes an organization from a vague problem to a justified, costed solution. Stakeholder needs get sorted into utility, warranty, and experience before two processes turn them into an agreed approach and a recommended option. The business analyst now sits inside the product team as often as beside it, and owns requirements for the life of the solution.
Illustrated figure on a flying carpet soaring over a futuristic city representing the independent journey of introducing ServiceDesk Plus to Iran

ServiceDesk Plus in Iran: Never an Official ManageEngine Partner, but Two Decades of Building the Market Anyway

Before ManageEngine and ServiceDesk Plus meant anything in Iran, Hadi Ahmadi was already making the case for it, one skeptical meeting at a time. Blocked from an official partnership by sanctions on contracts, payments, and licensing, his team trained IT staff and built Persian content anyway. This article is a firsthand account of educating a market for a brand that never signed them on.
Illustrated IT workers carrying heavy fragmented loads through a server corridor representing increased ITSM work levels after AI adoption

AI is Helping ITSM Teams. So Why Does the Work Still Feel Heavier?

SolarWinds surveyed 844 IT professionals for its 2026 State of ITSM report, and the results cut two ways. Eighty-four percent said AI met or exceeded ROI expectations, saving close to nine hours a week on detection, support, and triage. Yet 52% said overall workload increased, driven by new work maintaining integrations, validating outputs, and training staff. Outcome-based measurement separates the two groups.
Illustrated desk scene with a stained official document representing a service failure caused by an erroneous death report

When the System Works and the Service Still Fails

Mark Patnaude’s wife learned she was dead – not metaphorically. An erroneous Social Security record triggered a five-week ordeal that exposed a truth every technology leader should sit with: systems can perform exactly as designed while the service they deliver still fails the customer entirely.
Colourful illustrated workflow diagram with connected nodes representing a custom Slack ticketing workflow

How to Build a Custom Ticketing Workflow Inside a Slack Channel

Most Slack-based support isn’t a service desk; it’s a search bar and good intentions, and every untracked request is a governance issue waiting to surface. Taylor Halliday walks through building a real ticketing workflow with two channels, Slack’s Workflow Builder, and an emoji status board, then lays out exactly which pains mean you’ve outgrown the hack and need a dedicated tool.
Abstract illustrated network of interconnected nodes overlaid on human silhouettes representing agentic AI governance and multi-agent systems

Agentic AI Governance: How Do We Govern What We Didn’t Design?

Agentic AI systems build responses nobody specified in advance, and traditional governance models weren’t built for that. Jon Stevens-Hall draws on complexity thinking, from Cynefin to LLM-as-judge testing, to ask what it takes to govern behavior that develops rather than behavior that’s designed, and why loosening control in the right places might be the only way to keep it.
Abstract illustrated stacked data layers in blue and red representing the AI agent data layer foundation for ITSM trust

Before You Trust an AI Agent, Trust Your Data Layer

Salil Kulkarni, CSIO at Virima, argues that when an AI agent gets overridden, the issue is rarely the model. It’s a data layer that’s stale, incomplete, or missing the context a human would have caught. Drawing on decades leading technology at Caesars, Las Vegas Sands, and in hospitality revenue management, he sets out four conditions a data layer must meet before an AI agent can be trusted to act.
Illustrated figure standing at a crossroads between a stormy chaotic landscape and a calm structured one representing ESM adoption choices

Want Better ESM Adoption? Stop Suggesting ESM

Matt Beran’s advice is blunt: never suggest ESM. He argues that IT teams jump straight to the framework and the acronym before another department has finished describing its actual problem, and that this is what turns a useful idea into an initiative people resist. His case is to help departments examine their own work first, let them own the solution, and let ESM show up without ever needing the name.