
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Pat Calhoun, CEO and founder, Espressive
2019 is the Year When AI Will Enable ITSM to Finally Shift Left
Customers traditionally have used IT Service Management
(ITSM) tools to improve back office processes. More recently, IT set its sights
on further embracing digital transformation by engaging employees via an effort
to shift left. These efforts have largely failed as traditional self-help tools,
such as portals and knowledge base articles, have been rejected by employees -
resulting in an ever-growing call and email volume to service desks.
In 2018, enterprises began to look at AI to improve the
employee experience in an attempt to reboot their shift left initiatives. There
were two main approaches to delivering an AI-based ITSM experience, but both
fell short of expectations.
1. Toolkits - Some ITSM vendors provided toolkits
and frameworks that enabled organizations to build chatbots, as well as
third-party tools like Watson or Agent.ai. The issue these presented was
expertise, time and money. A company would need to hire an army of linguists,
AI experts and data scientists to build and support an app that delivered a
consumer-like AI experience.
2. Google-like searchbots - A number of vendors
introduced chatbots that provided a Google-like algorithm to enable a more
efficient search of existing knowledge base articles. However, these "searchbots"
failed because they relied on a knowledge base foundation that most
organizations did not have, and employees had already voted against.
In 2019, Espressive predicts that AI for employee self-help will
advance from toolkits and searchbots to pre-built consumer-like apps that will help
employees get the information they need so they can focus on their jobs. For an
app to be adopted by employees, we believe it has to be intuitive and accessible
across Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, MacOS and browsers. It must provide
immediate, personalized answers to questions and help resolving issues and
completing tasks (e.g., like password reset). Also, because these apps will be
easy to deploy, adoption will be accelerated.
When this occurs, we predict that enterprises will be able
to further their digital transformation initiatives, while improving the
perception of IT across the enterprise and growing employee net promoter scores
(NPS). Bottom line, enterprises will finally be able to shift left, moving the
activity of providing resolution support as close to the front line and the
employee as possible, and CIOs will be able to divert their budgets from
answering repetitive questions to more strategic initiatives.
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About the Author
Pat Calhoun is a visionary leader with
an intense focus on user experience and customer adoption. He has founded two
companies - Airespace and Espressive. As CEO at Espressive, Pat is set to
transform the enterprise self-service experience to a consumer-like approach
that drives employee adoption and significantly reduces help desk calls. Pat's
first startup, Airespace, grew revenues to over $80M in two years before being
sold to Cisco for $450M.
Most recently, Pat served as senior
vice president of product at ServiceNow where he was responsible for
ServiceNow applications. Prior to that, he was general manager of the McAfee
network security business. Pat also served as both CTO for the Cisco $14B
switching, routing, wireless, and security access business and GM of the
Cisco identity business. Pat holds 35 patents and has been published in more
than 16 publications.