Diary of a conference aficionado: ESM, ITAM, AIOps, and XM at ITSM24

It’s no secret that I am grateful to itSMF UK for all the great work they do throughout the year for their members and the wider ITSM community – masterclasses, simulation workshops, member meetups, webinars, sharing best practice resources or organising service management forums. However, the top event each year is the itSMF Annual Conference.

This year was even more special for us at CDW UK and for me personally. One of the two events that we co-run with itSMF – a simulation workshop – was documented by Simon Rolley on the itSMF blog and was nominated as one of the top 3 articles in the Content of the Year award category. On top of that, I had the opportunity to (hopefully) encourage fellow conference attendees to start their AIOps journey in my presentation.

Most amazingly Square Enix, with whom our Digital Enablement team have worked very closely since 2022 to help them (with other partners) to mature their service management, has won the award for Service Innovation of the Year! Moments like these make it easier for everyone involved to get up to work every day. Well done to Alex Cosma, Gareth Cantrell, Andrew Metcalfe and the whole team for their award, beating the likes of Arup, BT, and Vodafone!

It’s been much fun to join CDW Managed Services colleagues during some of the talks, the awards dinner, on the dance floor, and even posing for a picture with the PSMA24 host, the incredibly funny Ellie Taylor! What a gem of the British stand-up scene.

The conference programme was packed with amazing talks, often resulting in Sophie’s choice. However, just like in Service Management, we can only manage so many projects with the resources (time, people, money) we have. I prioritised based on the impact the topic would likely have on our five key conversations – ESM, ITAM, AIOps, and XM – and on the urgency of their applicability within the industry in 2025. Let me attempt to summarise my key learnings below.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM)

Created in 1989 in the UK, ITIL has had an impressive impact on the global service management industry. Updated in 2001 to ITIL v2, and 2007 to ITIL v3, its latest version (ITIL 4, from 2019) may need updating very soon, especially with the emergence of AI, DEX, and security challenges in the industry. As Barclay Rae pointed out, he has been hearing that “the service desk will cease to exist in the next five years” for a couple of decades, and it still has not gone anywhere. We can expect organisations to retain the need for a team of service management professionals for the foreseeable future.

However, what’s likely to change rapidly is the skillset required to operate the new shiny platforms and tools and how they interact with the end users. We can already see successful applications of GenAI across ticket summarisation, email writing and tone adjustment, knowledge base management, and application of ML for predicting major incidents, routing and prioritising work, discovering patterns, or delivering high-quality self-service.

The agents will be expected to use AI to suggest the best next action, decide on which workflow automation scripts to apply, review their success rates, and review AI-written knowledge articles. Most importantly, as James Warriner pointed out in his presentation, they will need to help us offer a fast, personalised service. This should be tailored to each user based on their tech skills, technology, role/hierarchical position, and history.

With the application of DEX intelligence, service management departments will have access to intelligently processed end-user device performance data, helping to reduce shadow IT, painful device rollouts, and end users spotting incidents long before IT teams.

Nonetheless, the key cultural change will be the democratisation of data. Anyone with access (e.g., a business stakeholder) is going to be able to use NLU and GenAI to query their operational data, removing the language barrier between IT and the business.  James Warriner further pointed out that even ‘bad’ historical data is still data, and it is important to keep your data when moving from one ITSM platform to another so that you can train the predictive algorithms. Otherwise, generating enough data to leverage in your platform’s AI features may take years.

Neville Hughes argues that the future is Zero Touch, as 60% of users never contact ITSD, 45% of companies with highly engaged employees are more productive, and 63% of employers find it harder to retain than recruit employees. Whilst that makes perfect sense as an organisational aspiration and drives further adoption of hyperautomation, in reality, I believe we still have at least a decade of human-to-human service delivery ahead of us.

IT Asset Management (ITAM)

Although asset management has never truly reached the buzzword status of cloud, AI, hyperpersonalisation, or ESG, it silently powers all of them. To service and support your cloud and train your AI to be as valuable as possible, you need to know what you have and its state. To personalise your employees’ experience, you need to manage their assets and understand how they use their devices and with what success, sentiment, and productivity. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, managing the device’s lifecycle is key to understanding where savings can be made. And the list goes on!

Therefore, I was happy to see our partners from Device42 and their new owner, Freshworks, come up on stage and hear them talk about what we already see across our customer base:

• Data Centre and Cloud Management – 75% improvement in the speed of health checks
• ITOM/CMDB 60% improvement in operational efficiency
• ITAM – 30% financial savings in IT equipment and software consolidation
• Migration – 70% improvement in the speed of completing a refresh.

The key reason that ITAM is not as mature as we would all like, so many decades after its conceptualisation in ITIL, is that you need accountability and focus to save business costs and prevent downtime. Focusing on the asset lifecycle is only possible if you have automated discovery and dependency mapping. Otherwise, your CMDB will be out of data as soon as you update it. When you want to leverage AI in operations, it is key to have your dependencies mapped, and this is where Device42 is one of the market leaders.

Artificial Intelligence in Operations (AIOps)

Speaking of AIOps, Aaron Perrott from KTSL delivered a comprehensive overview of our diverse, distributed, dynamic, and decentralised operations world. He stressed that it is vital for service departments to cut through the noise as 99% of data is likely irrelevant in resolving the specific case, costing agents valuable Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) when conducting Root Cause Analysis (RCA). And that’s where AI excels – pointing out to the agents where to look. According to their survey, 49% of respondents had already started their AIOps journey, with 84% already seeing benefits in enhanced decision-making, increased productivity and saved time in repetitive task automation. However, only 3.75% have fully integrated AIOps into their operations and processes, leaving plenty of room for further gains.

However shameless a plug this is, I must mention my own presentation on the state of the market adopting AI in operations, which summarised the benefits various organisations have already experienced worldwide and the importance of communicating these benefits in a non-IT language to the business.

The key takeaway for those attending was that the AIOps solutions in the market vary widely in the maturity of their LLM, usability of their UI, reporting capabilities, and dependency on human resources to continuously monitor AI performance and flow automation. The technology has moved on so quickly in the last couple of years that customers should not settle for 90% event noise reduction but aim for 99.9% and the ability to query their data with NLU and GenAI-powered assistants.

Experience Management (XM)

Although I couldn’t attend all of the dedicated XM sessions, it was obvious that whether the core of the conversation was about ITSM Core and Value (Barclay Rae), Humanising IT (Kat McDermid/Mark Basham), DevOps (David Tomlinson), Sassy Chaos (Simone Jo Moore and Vawns Murphy), Zero Touch Service Desk (Neville Hughes), or Driving Service Improvement (Paula Thomsen and Heather Gubb), effectively communicating with the end-users, gathering quantitative and qualitative data, automating its processing, and actioning feedback were seen as crucially important for correctly prioritising service delivery improvement initiatives.

As Barclay Rae pointed out, Experience Management Agreements (XLAs) remain a challenge. Even with a DEX/ITXM platform in place processing the data, it still requires a team accountable for actioning the outputs and continuously reviewing and updating the XLA targets. This dependency is possibly one reason the average lifetime of an SLA is 20 years!

An honourable mention goes to Robert Gething and Geoff Soper from IPO, who added entertaining puns throughout their presentation. I am sure no one will be looking back in anger on their Monitoring Wonderwall…

To summarise, usable versions of machine learning, GenAI, and experience management platforms have arrived, moving the industry forward at an unprecedented pace. It’s great to see Sandra Whittleston and David Bowers from the Open University attending the conference, looking for new, innovative ways to prepare future generations of service management professionals to drive the industry forward. We need more educational institutions taking a keen interest in how to make their curriculum more relevant.

I recommend you add ITSM25 in Milton Keynes on 10-11th November to your calendar. You can already book your pass here – see you all there!