Shift-Left
According to Gartner, 60% of Service Desk requests are standard requests, many of which are fulfilled by means of repeatable, multi-step procedures. Such tasks soon become monotonous for support teams, which in turn can easily lead to bored and demotivated staff, with mistakes being made as a result of human error. This is clearly a problem that has a negative effect on both employees and customers, and is one of the underlying issues driving many organisations to embrace the concept of Shift-Left which looks to place the ability to resolve many of these standard requests in the hands of the end users themselves, often through a comprehensive menu driven self-service portal atop an underlying service management toolset.
As a principle this is a sound approach, but it is totally reliant on the clear and accurate definition of large numbers of business rules which are used to underpin the operation of the portal. Writing and maintaining these business rules is in itself a huge undertaking and is an overhead that is often overlooked by those captivated by the prospect of implementing a new, shiny portal. Indeed, much of the saving in support effort achieved by shifting left, and handing the capability to users, will likely need to be repurposed to support the portal’s underlying administration, because if the business rules are not kept up to date, errors will occur undermining the portal’s entire value proposition.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Whilst still considered by many to be a scary concept, AI is actually very well established in todays online driven
and when to take it. Given the unpredictable and reactive nature of IT, having the bandwidth to make those decisions and implement them can often be a challenge.
Another consideration is what data is needed to support the decision-making process? To quote the venerable “7 Step Improvement Process” from ITIL v3’s CSI textbook, serious thought needs to be applied to “Defining what we will measure” rather than just accepting
what data is currently captured.
Process data is typically very structured and useful as a result, but it can often benefit from being considered in context alongside data from other sources, which may lack any structure of its own. Combining all these disparate data sets together can prove to be a challenge
but doing so to enable the creation of
consolidated dashboards is certainly the
direction of travel for many organisations just now.
But what if Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be used to proactively take the lead and make things happen automatically? It is happening in other industries, so perhaps now is the time
for IT, and in particular service management, to embrace the possibility.