IT landscape changes & business challenges driving ITSM transformation
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IT landscape changes and business challenges driving ITSM transformation
Stephen Laurin
Published on 6 November 2025
11 min read
Stephen Laurin
Published on 6 November 2025
11 min read
The role of IT service management (ITSM) has evolved far beyond being viewed as a ticketing system and service desk. Today, it’s a critical enabler of business operations—supporting hybrid workforces, ensuring security and compliance, and driving operational efficiency across increasingly complex environments.
The pressure to transform ITSM solutions is mounting. From AI-driven automation and cost optimisation to governance and security, organisations are recognising that traditional service management approaches are no longer fit for purpose. To stay competitive, IT leaders must understand not just what is changing, but why—and how these shifts can be leveraged to create more intelligent, connected, and resilient IT operations that can scale and adapt to a foreseeable digital future.
This blog explores the current state of ITSM, the forces accelerating change, and the critical challenges that businesses must overcome to future-proof their service management strategy.
Why ITSM change is ramping up
The demand for ITSM transformation has intensified across organisations of all sizes, driven by converging technological, operational, and financial pressures. Understanding these drivers is crucial for building a compelling business case and maintaining stakeholder alignment throughout your transformation journey.
Shifting expectations and hybrid work
Employees now expect fast, seamless service regardless of whether they're in the office, remote, or working in hybrid arrangements. Legacy tools often struggle with usability, responsiveness, and mobile-friendly support, creating friction that undermines productivity and satisfaction. What began as emergency remote working has evolved into permanent operational models, exposing fundamental limitations in ITSM systems designed for on-premise, face-to-face support.
AI and automation becoming baseline requirements
According to Atomicwork's 'State of AI in ITSM 2025' report, AI adoption is rapidly becoming a baseline expectation rather than a competitive differentiator. Many organisations report already using AI for data analysis (55%), end-user assistants (48%), knowledge management (43%), and incident management (39%) - adopting AI into these use cases could allow it to provide guidance on how to resolve an incident based on the previous incidents resolved. Organisations using legacy systems without these capabilities find themselves at a significant disadvantage in both operational efficiency and user experience.
At Adaptavist, our experts are seeing strong demand to use AI for self service and knowledge sharing with a push to have they own internal "chatGPT" to answer internal questions, such as “how do I reset my password?”. Going one step further, having AI for automated processes, it is able to understand and gather the necessary data to automatically action a system - e.g “I need access to Microsoft Teams”, the AI can gather the data (Who are you?, what department do you work in? etc). The automation set up would then initiate the license to be processed.
Cost pressures and SaaS subscription creep
Maintenance, licensing, and upgrade fees continue rising whilst many organisations feel they're paying more without seeing proportional gains. The total cost of ownership for many solutions—including administrative overhead and expensive add-ons—often exceeds the value delivered, prompting urgent reassessment of ITSM investments.
In relation to licensing, a robust ITSM system is required to manage all of the licences across the organisation, making sure that they are properly utilised and costs and functionality requirements are managed carefully. This is known as Software Application Management in the ITSM field, and is becoming a core requirement.
Security, privacy, and governance concerns
With AI, cloud infrastructure, and distributed teams, issues of data protection, AI governance, regulatory compliance, and vendor risk management have become more critical than ever. Legacy systems often lack the security frameworks and compliance capabilities required in today's threat landscape, creating both operational and legal risks.
It’s more important than ever that organisations learn how to manage their IT Security in a world where infrastructures are on-premise, cloud-based and sometimes self built. At the same time, you must understand where the potential vulnerabilities in your systems lie, in order to address them. This also applies to physical hardware, making sure they’re all secured (e.g Antivirus software is up to date).
Tool fatigue, feature sprawl, and integration gaps
Many IT teams have accumulated multiple tools with overlapping functions, manual workarounds, and systems that don't communicate effectively. This friction translates directly into user dissatisfaction and poor tool adoption. The complexity of maintaining disconnected systems drains resources that could be invested in value-adding activities.
Strategic paradigm shifts
Industry analysts, including Forrester, argue that organisations should fundamentally rethink legacy ITSM processes. The recommendation is to move from reactive support models to proactive service management through AI-enabled workflows and knowledge graphs. This strategic shift requires ITSM platforms capable of supporting modern operational paradigms rather than simply automating traditional processes.
Four critical business problems
Through extensive experience working with organisations across diverse industries, six fundamental business problems consistently emerge when ITSM solutions become inadequate:
Outdated and end-of-life tools
Many organisations have maintained their ITSM tools and processes for considerable periods without fundamental review or modernisation. As business expectations evolve in some cases, the technology ceases to meet the demands and lack scalability, becoming increasingly misaligned with organisational needs. The gap between what the business requires and what the ITSM solution can deliver continues to widen over time.
40% of organisations are still planning to change or reimplement their solution.*
The 2025 ITSM tool churn poll
itsm.tools
To try and rectify these challenges, many IT teams have ended up with multiple tools, overlapping functions, manual workarounds, and systems that don’t talk to each other. The friction this creates translates into user dissatisfaction, which results in poor tool adoption.
Single points of failure
Organisations often face critical challenges with knowledge silos and single points of failure, where essential ITSM expertise, system understanding, and customisation knowledge become concentrated in just a few individuals or specific system components. This creates dangerous dependencies that not only limit the broader team’s capability but also expose the business to significant risk. When these key individuals depart or when a critical component fails, organisations are left with severe knowledge gaps or operational vulnerabilities that can cripple service delivery, disrupt operations, and compromise business continuity. This is also the case when it comes to contractors. If your ITSM tool instance was originally set up by a contractor, it may be too complex/ customised for anyone within the organisation to manage, meaning you could be locked in with the original contractor.
Ever-evolving ways of working
Organisational culture, business processes, and operational models continuously evolve in response to market conditions, competitive pressures, and strategic initiatives. ITSM solutions that cannot adapt to these changes become barriers to organisational agility and effectiveness.
Employees expect fast, seamless service, whether in the office, remote, or hybrid. Legacy tools often struggle with usability, responsiveness, or mobile-friendly support
Financial pressures
The total cost of ownership for ITSM solutions often escalates beyond acceptable levels, creating unsustainable financial burdens. This includes direct costs like licensing and maintenance, as well as indirect costs related to inefficiencies, workarounds, and lost productivity.
Many organisations feel trapped by the exponential growth of maintenance and licensing costs without seeing proportional gains.
Interconnected problem patterns
These business problems rarely exist in isolation. Organisations typically experience multiple interconnected challenges that compound their impact on business operations. For example, outdated tools combined with knowledge silos create particularly dangerous situations where you will not be able to effectively maintain or evolve your systems.
The relationship between these problems creates cascading effects throughout the organisation. When tools become outdated and knowledge becomes siloed, the perceived value of the ITSM solution decreases significantly. This reduction in perceived value makes it difficult to justify continued investment, creating a downward spiral that ultimately necessitates comprehensive change.
Understanding these interconnected patterns is crucial for developing effective transformation strategies. It's important to address multiple problems simultaneously rather than attempting piecemeal solutions that fail to address root causes.
Conclusion: rethinking ITSM for the next era of digital operations
The acceleration of ITSM transformation reflects a broader truth: service management is no longer just about keeping the lights on—it’s about enabling continuous value delivery across every facet of the organisation. Outdated tools, siloed knowledge, and manual processes are not just operational inefficiencies; they are strategic risks that limit agility, increase costs, and erode trust.
As AI, automation, and cloud-native architectures redefine the expectations of modern IT, organisations must rethink their service management foundations. Success depends on adopting flexible, integrated platforms capable of supporting proactive, data-driven service delivery.
*Danby, S. (2025) ‘ITSM Tool Churn in 2025 – It’s Better News’, ITSM.tools, 26 August. Available at: https://itsm.tools/itsm-tool-churn/
Written by
Service Management Practice Team Lead
With extensive experience in business consulting, Stephen has assisted organisations of various sizes in implementing and improving service management practices. He excels at navigating complex implementations in the Atlassian ecosystem, with a primary focus on practicality and efficiency.