Is Automation a Threat to My Job?

ManageEngine, a real-time IT management company and the creators of ServiceDesk Plus, the IT service desk software used by more than 100,000 organizations worldwide, just announced the results of its IT Service Management Future Readiness survey.

The survey, which was conducted in collaboration with ITSM.tools, consisted of ten questions that focused on the opportunities and challenges ITSM will see in the future. It was presented to ITSM professionals and garnered over 300 responses, yielding key findings in five distinct areas.

Strong Affinity for the Cloud; AI Not a Threat to Jobs

• Working in IT: Eighty-two percent of ITSM professionals believe that the IT roles of tomorrow will be more challenging — and the majority of the workforce currently feels undervalued by management.
• Impact of politics on IT staffing: More than 60 percent of respondents feel that current global and local political scenarios — like Brexit, the recent U.S. election, and Australian immigration policies — will adversely affect recruitment for IT roles.
• New technology: Cloud technology continues to enjoy positive feedback from ITSM professionals in spite of a major outage. Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t seen as a major job disruptor yet, with only 16 percent of respondents saying it will affect IT jobs.
• Best practices: Only 24 percent of ITSM professionals show confidence in the existing ITSM best practices, including ITIL, making a strong case for their revamp.
• Meeting service expectations: With an incoming millennial workforce, 77 percent of ITSM professionals believe that IT teams will have to do more to manage the expectation gap between younger and older employees.

ITSM Is Getting Shaped by the Cloud, AI, and a Millennial Workforce

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 also believe that they need to do better to match the expectations of the incoming workforce of millennials. 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 the cloud. Also revealed in the survey, only 16 percent of respondents said that they view the development of AI as a threat to IT jobs, contradicting what’s seen as a popular notion.

The Relevance of ITIL in a Changing ITSM Landscape

While only 5 percent of respondents feel that ITIL and other published ITM 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.

“The ITSM industry is continually evolving in response to its micro and macro influencers, like technology, people, practices and government regulations,” says 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.”

He goes on to say:

“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. “There are multiple root causes, including nearly two-thirds of respondents think that the current local and global political climate is adversely affecting IT recruitment; only 24 percent of respondents think that existing ITSM best practices have kept up with the changing IT and business landscapes; and 77 percent of respondents think that there is still more to be done to meet the expectations of millennial employees. Ultimately, as an industry, we still need to invest more in getting modern IT support right.”

The IT Service Management Future Readiness survey by ManageEngine and ITSM.tools is available for download here.