AI is not the only thing that IT service professionals are losing their sleep over

Contradicting what’s seen as a popular notion, Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t seen as a major job disruptor by the ITSM(IT Service Management) professionals yet, although, a majority(82 percent) of them believe that the IT roles of tomorrow will be more challenging.

Only 16 percent of respondents said that they view the development of AI as a threat to IT jobs, reveals the results of its IT Service Management Future Readiness survey by ManageEngine in collaboration with ITSM.tools.

Instead, meeting service expectation will be more  challenging for them in the coming times, they said. Interestingly, while a majority of ITSM professionals (57 percent) feel that their IT teams deliver equal or better service than consumer-facing companies, 77 percent of ITSM professionals believe that IT teams will have to do more to manage the expectation gap between younger and older employees, especially with an incoming millennial workforce.

Cloud technology also continues to enjoy positive feedback from ITSM professionals in spite of a major outage. The timing of this survey — almost coinciding with the widespread outage of a cloud service provider in February 2017 — also brings to the surface a strong affinity for cloud technology. Even with this incident, only 8 percent of respondents had a negative opinion about cloud.

The Relevance of ITIL in a Changing ITSM Landscape 

Only 24 percent of ITSM professionals show confidence in the existing ITSM best practices, including ITIL, making a strong case for their revamp. The ITIL(Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework enables IT to be a business service partner, rather than just back-end support.

While only 5 percent of respondents feel that ITIL and other published ITSM practices are irrelevant, roughly 66 percent believe ITIL and other ITSM best practices have failed to keep up with the changing ITSM landscape. These findings reinforce the need for ITIL to reinvent itself to keep pace with the changing trends in IT.

“It’s interesting — and worrying — that 82 percent of survey respondents believe that working in IT will get harder over the next three years,” said Stephen Mann, Principal Analyst and Content Director at ITSM.tools.

More than 60 percent of respondents also feel that current global and local political scenarios — like Brexit, the recent US election and Australian immigration policies — will adversely affect recruitment for IT roles.

“The ITSM industry is continually evolving in response to its micro and macro influencers, like technology, people, practices and government regulations,” said Rajesh Ganesan, Director of Product Management at ManageEngine. “Being aware of potential future challenges and opportunities helps ITSM professionals stay relevant and responsive to changing landscapes in IT and business, giving their organizations a competitive edge.”