Fusion 2017: Top 3 Trends Impacting IT Support

Fall is here and with that we can always count on a few things – cooler weather, pumpkin spice flavored everything, and for IT professionals, attending Fusion one of the best events of the year for the service management community. I was lucky enough to attend this year and I have to say, it was a really great few days. There was a lot of energy, a ton of great conversations and an overall sense that the future of IT service will certainly be challenging, but also extremely rewarding.

Here are my top 3 key takeaways from my week in Orlando:

1. The Consumerization of IT is Finally Having an Impact on IT Trends
   It was only a matter of time…right? The concept of “Consumerization of IT” has been around for quite some time, but now it’s really starting to take hold in IT service and support. Customers now expect the same level of service from their IT teams as they do from the cutting-edge companies they work with in their consumer lives. They expect timely and personalized support always, for any device, in any location. IT teams are being challenged to keep up with leading consumer brands like Apple and Amazon that spend much of their focus on delighting their customers. They make doing business with them easy and in the case of Apple, support becomes more of an experience, than a hassle. Acknowledging this trend, companies are now trying to figure out how to meet these demands while still maintaining employee productivity levels. They are doing this by focusing on the customer experience – whether it be in capturing user feedback to focusing on journey mapping – organizations are identifying changes that they can make to improve the customer experience from start to finish.
2. Agility is the Key to Success
   With the speed and frequency that technology is changing, the escalation of employee expectations, rapid business growth, and new tools being adopted across companies independent of traditional IT evaluation – IT teams need to be fast and flexible to be able to fully support their organization. Adopting Agile processes – using incremental, iterative work cadences and empirical feedback to drive change – will help organizations keep up with the evolving demands. Taking small, purposeful steps to tackle larger initiatives or vet new tools will make these typically high-effort projects feel much less burdensome. Similarly, taking this approach to reviewing older, outdated, non-purpose built tools and building business cases – with user feedback – can help you get out from those solutions which are holding IT teams back.
3. AI is Here to Stay
   Just like in every other part of our lives, IT leaders are taking interest in automation and the impact it has to streamline their workflows, help agents solve problems more easily, and scale the growth of their organization much quicker. Many organizations are also seeking to understand how the tools and systems they employ can integrate into AI technology to provide better outcomes for end-users.As part of this, there is an increased awareness around the need to drive more end-users toward self-service, especially for simple, routine tasks that do not require agent support. This idea of shifting support down and to the left (and ultimately out to self-service) will be an important topic of discussion for many help desks in the year to come. Organizations are quickly determining that it is not enough to have a user-facing Help Center but that you also must educate end-users that it exists, and give it the power to actually solve their problems easily, in order to achieve adoption and optimal success.

Just as we can’t slow the passing of the seasons, we can’t slow the trends affecting support either. As we approach a new year, there’s never been a better time to evaluate your current processes and plan how you can improve them to meet these new consumer-like demands in the months to come.

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