Practical Advice for Introducing AI into Service Management

Abstract

In the following chapter, we summarize best practices for the introduction of AI in service management, for the benefit of IT leaders and their teams. In our view, the following points are essential:

• 1. Introducing AI has to be part of a holistic strategy of transforming service management. It requires both top-down leadership support as well as community engagement, and clear communication of expected results as well as limitations. It is not just about selection of technologies and training of practitioners but has deep implications for processes and organizational culture.

• 2. AI has great potential to significantly change and elevate the work that performed by human experts by identifying automation opportunities. This requires different skills and organizational setups and should be use to accelerate agile transformation. We suggest to run the introduction of AI as an agile project, with disciplined iterations and clear measurements [1]

• 3. A successful AI strategy for IT requires establishing a data-driven approach and culture. Understanding IT operational data (especially ticket data for incidents and service requests) is a prerequisite to knowing what questions to ask and how to accelerate the training of AI.

• 4. When building ground truths, leverage your organizational knowledge and treat it as an enterprise asset, but also be prepared to challenge hidden assumptions. Establish an end-to-end knowledge lifecycle strategy that engages the subject matter experts.