What is ITSM? Managing IT to serve business needs

ITSM service desk

One primary discipline that falls under ITSM is the service desk, which is defined in the ITIL manual. ITIL views service desks as a Single Point of Contact (SPOC), which can streamline communication within an organization or business unit. Service desks act as hubs for users and customers to contact well-trained staff to manage issues in an organized and coordinated manner.

The service desk is also viewed as a primary IT function in ITSM to provide a SPOC to accommodate and manage users, IT staff, customers, and IT objectives. An IT service desk, call center, or help desk is the central hub for incident tickets, service requests, questions, internal issues, client and customer service, and more. As such, it’s importance is heavily emphasized in the ITSM discipline as well as the ITIL framework.

What is the use of AI in ITSM?

Despite being a relatively recent technology, AI found an early home in ITSM, helping businesses better streamline customer service. Ticketing portals have been commonplace in service management, helping organize and assign tickets to the correct IT staff. The chat bot is another early implementation of AI and ML, guiding customers through preliminary questions to point them to the right representative, or solving simple questions to reduce workload on IT support staff. AI has also been used in ITSM to improve personalization for end-users, based on past interactions and user profile information.