The Gartner^® Hype Cycle™ for ITSM, 2023* details the IT practices and transformational technologies that are hitting the “Peak of Inflated Expectations (e.g., IT/OT/ET alignment); those in the “Trough of Disillusionment (e.g., SOAR); and those that have reached the “Plateau of Productivity” (e.g., cloud management platforms).

What remains in the “Innovation Trigger” category once again? Service operations, or ServiceOps. Take a look:

What is ServiceOps?

In the report, Gartner defines ServiceOps as “The convergence of the infrastructure and application monitoring environments with the ITSM incident management practice to create a more effective and optimized mechanism for diagnosing and resolving incidents. The combination of the two environments with the context of AI can lead to a significant reduction in both the number and impact of incidents.”

Why is it important?

According to the report, “the ability to quickly diagnose and resolve incidents is critical for organizations as they develop and implement digital services. Intelligent automation can remove monitoring and service desk silos, creating the concept of service operations. This ensures that incident detection through monitoring can be better integrated with ITSM platforms, leading to incidents that can be more readily identified and resolved creating higher availability and more resilient services.”

What is the business impact?

In the report, Gartner explains the impact this way: “The convergence of ITSM and monitoring environments results in a more productive and seamless incident management practice. The contextual analysis of alerts resulting in anomaly detection and escalation can result in fewer incidents and improved mean time to resolve (MTTR), especially when integrated with the ITSM platform. Products and services are more available and less likely to suffer from poor performance or outages and disruption, costs are reduced, and overall productivity is improved.”

Gartner adds that there are several factors driving ServiceOps right now: “Business pressure for reliable and stable services drives the demand for incidents to be either eliminated before they can cause disruption or be diagnosed and resolved as quickly as possible.”

Advances in technology and ITSM are also helping drive ServiceOps. According to Gartner, other drivers include:

• The closer integration of monitoring and the service desk that creates a more seamless environment in which outages and disruptions can be more effectively managed.
• ITSM platforms featuring observability and correlation functions to identify incidents as part of the monitoring capabilities.
• ITSM platforms can now enrich events by applying the context of recent incidents and changes to impacted configuration items (CIs) to improve root-cause identification.
• The rise in the use of AI which enables the monitoring systems to swiftly correlate events and anomalies to present to technicians via the ITSM platform.

Obstacles to ServiceOps

According to the report, ServiceOps also faces obstacles. The report states: “AI-based monitoring services can take longer than expected to understand the context of the services, the traffic, and the environment creating delays in improving availability.”

Gartner explains that ServiceOps requires “Improved diagnostics and resolution times require time and effort to achieve due to dependencies including effective service mapping, the degree of automation and the quality of monitoring. This requires a concerted effort to achieve a holistic approach. Accurate service mapping and comprehensive, up-to-date configuration management databases are necessary to support end-to-end incident processes if enhanced availability and resilience is to be achieved,” and “automated responses need to be carefully chaperoned to ensure that their decisions match the use case.”

Gartner also explains, “Many monitoring and service desk teams operate in silos, making it difficult to create a seamless experience.”

Generative AI

This year, Gartner included generative AI in its report, noting the “interest in how AI underpins ITSM has gained momentum due to generative AI applications like ChatGPT.” The report categorizes generative AI as hitting the “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” as shown in the chart above. But Gartner anticipates it will reach a plateau in just two to five years.

What is Generative AI?

As Gartner defines it, “Generative AI technologies can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. Generative AI has profound business impacts, including on content discovery, creation, authenticity and regulations; automation of human work; and customer and employee experiences.”

Why is it important?

According to Gartner: “Generative AI exploration is accelerating, thanks to the popularity of Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, and large language models. End-user organizations in most industries aggressively experiment with generative AI. Technology vendors from generative AI groups to prioritize delivery of generative-AI-enabled applications and tools. Numerous startups have emerged in 2023 to innovate with generative AI, and we expect this to grow. Some governments are evaluating the impacts of generative AI and preparing to introduce regulations.”

What is the business impact?

Gartner notes the business impact of generative AI in the report, explaining, “Most technology products and services will incorporate generative AI capabilities in the next 12 months, introducing conversational ways of creating and communicating with technologies, leading to their democratization. Generative AI will progress rapidly in industry verticals, scientific discovery, and technology commercialization.”

Among the drivers for generative AI, Gartner identifies: “Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing platforms are adding generative AI capabilities for reusability of generative models, making them accessible to AI teams.” Generative AI industry applications are growing, impacting creative work in marketing, design, music, and content. Generative AI is expected to disrupt software coding, and when “combined with development automation techniques, it can automate up to 30% of the programmers’ work,” according to Gartner.

Obstacles to generative AI

Generative AI poses many obstacles. Gartner states that “democratization of generative AI uncovers new ethical and societal concerns. Government regulations may hinder generative AI research.” The report adds that, “hallucinations, factual errors, bias, a black-box nature, and inexperience with a full AI lifecycle preclude the use of generative AI for critical use cases.”

Gartner also explains that the potential use of AI for nefarious purposes represents an obstacle, explaining, “Sadly, it will also become a security and societal threat when uses for nefarious purposes. Responsible AI, trust, and security will be necessary for the safe exploitation of generative AI.”

BMC’s approach to ServiceOps

BMC addressed ServiceOps when we combined our service management and operations management capabilities under one solution, the BMC Helix platform. Putting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at the core of BMC Helix, we created a complete, integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) digital transformation engine that converges ITSM and ITOM. BMC Helix modernizes processes and workflows for both service management and IT operations teams and empowers organizations to accelerate DevOps; leverage intelligence for faster, better decision-making; and strengthen collaboration.

We believe that ServiceOps removes organizational silos between service and operations management functions, opens new collaboration channels, elevates experiences, and boosts productivity for teams  by:

• Unifying data and workflows throughout hybrid cloud environments, minimizing manual, repetitive processes, and increasing the speed toward desired business outcomes.
• Spending less time reactively responding to incidents and proactively resolving them before they impact the business through integrated, cross-platform AI/ML, intelligent automation, and predictive service management in concert with other BMC Helix solutions.
• Automating processes and reducing silos to foster collaboration across IT, lines of business, product teams, and customers.

BMC’s approach to Generative AI

BMC HelixGPT is our answer to the next level of efficiency that enterprise operations will require with near real-time processing of operational data from infrastructure, applications, and end users. We believe that generative AI can establish a complete view of reality using this data from disparate sources, while ticket, incident, and change data inform how human beings have been responding to issues native to the environment and the business. BMC HelixGPT integrates all of these traditionally siloed data sources to derive actionable insights for anomalies and autonomous resolutions for mundane issues.

We developed BMC HelixGPT to ensure that the insights provided are human-relatable and still specific to the enterprise, so answers are based on organizational expertise, hence the term “expert of your systems.” We constrain our GPT with a domain- and tenant-specific model that continuously learns resolutions from subject matter experts (SMEs) in the organization.

BMC is excited to be a part of this transformational time in IT management and operations technology with our ServiceOps and generative AI offerings, and we will continue to innovate and integrate them with our BMC Helix portfolio.

*Gartner, Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2023, By Siddharth Shetty, Chris Laske, 14 July 2023.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT service management, organizations are constantly seeking innovative solutions that can streamline operations, enhance productivity, and improve the overall employee experience. BMC Helix ITSM has been acknowledged as an ITSM category Leader in the recently published 2023 GigaOm Radar Report for IT Service Management (ITSM) for its advanced features, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and ability to mitigate service delivery risks. If you are a current customer of Remedy, BMC’s legacy ITSM solution, now is the time to consider migrating to BMC Helix ITSM.

The report evaluated the latest ITSM solutions available based on their comprehensive capabilities, recognizing 13 demonstrating sophisticated and comprehensive capabilities resulting from market maturity in the service management space. With its depth and breadth of functionality, BMC Helix ITSM met key criteria and received high scores in self-service, knowledge management, and asset discovery.

Explore fast, flexible service management in action >

Driving business value through automation and AI

According to the report, “BMC Helix ITSM is a well-built ITSM platform with excellent use of AI, NLP, and intelligent heuristics. AI has been put to good use at all levels, and dashboards can be dynamic. Additionally, buyers that require customization are able to rely on a data model that enables user customization and an upgrade pathway for its on-premises ITSM solution.”

Margaret Lee, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Service and Operations Management at BMC, emphasizes the business value that modern ITSM can deliver, pointing out, “BMC believes that modern ITSM can deliver immense business value by helping organizations through automation and AI.”

BMC Helix ITSM stands at the forefront of IT service and operations management, delivering unparalleled innovation and transformative capabilities. We continue to redefine the possibilities of ITSM with AI-powered features, extensive digital employee experience personalization options, an integrated BMC Helix for ServiceOps platform, and a commitment to customer success.

The recognition of BMC Helix ITSM as a Leader by GigaOm reaffirms BMC’s commitment to empowering customers to harness the full potential of ITSM technology. Our solution enables them to deliver outstanding experiences, foster innovation, ensure operational excellence, and promote sustainability throughout the enterprise, with BMC as a trusted partner on their digital transformation journey.

To learn more, read the complete press release and download a complimentary copy of the 2023 GigaOm Radar Report for IT Service Management (ITSM) to see why BMC Helix ITSM is an industry-recognized SaaS solution for service management transformation.

Does your current IT service management (ITSM) solution align with your enterprise goals for business transformation today and tomorrow? If you’re currently using Remedy, BMC’s legacy ITSM solution you’re already familiar with the benefits of these powerful ITSM solutions. However, if your service desk is on a Remedy solution, now is the perfect time to explore migrating to BMC’s latest offering, BMC Helix ITSM, a SaaS platform delivering capabilities above and beyond what Remedy can deliver today.

With BMC Helix ITSM, your business can simplify complexity and fuel productivity through integrated intelligent automation, cloud-scale capacity, predictive case management, personalized user experiences, and self-service acceleration. And BMC is here to help you at every phase of the migration.

Let’s delve into how BMC Helix ITSM takes service management even further than Remedy and how BMC can help make the journey more seamless.

Embrace intelligent automation and workflows

Traditional ITSM processes often involve manual tasks that consume valuable time and resources. With BMC Helix ITSM and its embedded intelligent automation, your teams can automate routine and repetitive tasks, enabling your team to focus on more strategic initiatives. Here are a few use cases for simplifying complexity:

• Intelligent auto-routing of cases. Leverage historical case data, machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) algorithms to automatically assign and route incidents, requests, and changes to the most suitable IT team without manual intervention. This streamlines workflows, optimizes resource allocation, and saves valuable time.
• Predictive analytics and root cause analysis. Get access to data-driven insights to anticipate and prevent potential service disruptions. This proactive approach to problem management notifies IT teams so they can predict and isolate the root cause before the problem escalates. Deep integrations across BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, and BMC Helix Discovery further optimize resources, time, and capacity.
• AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents at your disposal. These capabilities are pre-integrated within the BMC Helix ITSM solution. By activating BMC Helix Virtual Agent, your teams can harness knowledge swarming with ChatOps for faster case resolution and automate responses to resolve more routine cases.

Improve service velocity and economics

The scalability and flexibility of your ITSM infrastructure are critical as your organization grows. BMC Helix ITSM harnesses the power of cloud computing, providing cloud-scale capacity that can adapt to your changing needs. By migrating to BMC Helix ITSM, you unlock the following advantages:

• An elastic ITSM infrastructure. Scale up or down based on demand with embedded scalability that ensures optimal performance and cost efficiency, eliminating the need for costly CapEx infrastructure investments.
• High availability and resiliency. Built-in redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities delivered by SaaS offer continuous availability of your ITSM data, applications, and services—even in the face of unexpected events. BMC Helix ITSM delivers a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than four hours.
• Simplified, automated maintenance and upgrades. Eliminate the burden of managing infrastructure and manual integrations every time there is a new software release with automatic maintenance and upgrades that allow your IT teams to redirect their focus on innovation, strategic initiatives, and delivering new services, features, and enhancements faster to keep pace with the evolving needs of users.

Delight users with new service experiences

When employees face difficult-to-navigate internal support channels or cumbersome task requisition processes, their everyday experience is diminished. By moving from Remedy to BMC Helix ITSM, your business can delight employees with an improved digital employee experience (DEX) that works with BMC Helix Employee Experience solutions, enabling teams within and beyond IT to:

• Build new work hubs embedding visual collaboration, content services, and work management across the business and IT departments with BMC Helix Digital Workplace
• Create custom experiences, microsites, and persona-driven journeys and improve employee engagement, productivity, and resolution times with BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio
• Activate multichannel self-service by integrating KCS® v6 verified BMC Helix Knowledge Management, BMC Helix Virtual Agent with live chat crossover, and natural language processing (NLP)-powered search

Our proven migration success approach

The migration journey from Remedy to BMC Helix ITSM may seem daunting, but we have successfully partnered with many of our customers on their journey to modernize their service management solutions by migrating to BMC Helix ITSM. We are committed to your success and offer comprehensive customer success and professional services offerings programs tailored to your needs.

The dedicated BMC Customer Success team is ready to assist you at every step. They work closely with you to understand your specific requirements, provide guidance on best practices, and ensure a smooth transition to BMC Helix ITSM. We have developed a five-phase process flow to accelerate the migration, as follows:

1. Assessment. We assess your existing environment to understand your current architecture and identify items such as customizations, integrations, and reports.
2. Configuration. With this information collected and analyzed, we configure the BMC Helix Data Manager (HDM) tool and begin migrating your data to BMC Helix ITSM.
3. Review. Once the data migration is complete, we will review the output from the tool and ensure that configurations and integrations are successfully migrated.  If there are issues, we will review them with you and resolve them as required.
4. Testing. Next, we execute a series of internal validation and performance testing before you begin user acceptance testing to confirm that your use cases are operating as expected.
5. Go live. Finally, we go live with BMC Helix ITSM.

Customer Success programs

BMC Customer Success is just one of our many programs. BMC also offers Professional Success subscriptions that integrate expert customer success consultants, premier support, and training and education to help your IT teams throughout the migration to BMC Helix ITSM, including:

• BMC Helix ITSM Migration Service for transitioning from BMC Remedy ITSM on-premises to BMC Helix ITSM SaaS
• BMC Helix ITSM Starter Service for initial configuration and administrator training

Making the move from Remedy  to BMC Helix ITSM opens up a world of possibilities for your ITSM by empowering your organization to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. As you embark on this journey, BMC stands by your side, offering dedicated support programs, professional services, and a wealth of knowledge to ensure your successful migration. It’s time to unlock the full potential of your ITSM capabilities and embrace the future with BMC Helix ITSM.

Services are driving economies around the world. Recent global events have put into focus how service creation, delivery, and management can impact every facet of our lives. Enterprises are finding new ways to be more agile and adapt faster to the changing needs of the global services economy. These new ways include supporting a distributed, hybrid workforce, managing supply chains to fulfill demand, assessing risk, and meeting escalating, always-on customer and user expectations. There are three common roadblocks to enterprise service management success:

1. Managing the complexity of multiple lines of business (LoBs) and legacy and digitized infrastructures.
2. Meeting the higher user expectations of employees, customers, developers, and technology partners.
3. Supporting the scale and response requirements necessary to service millions of unique users in real time.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, including BMC Helix ITSM, removes these common service management roadblocks by ensuring that all facets within enterprise LoBs come together to work smoothly, reduce risk, and prevent points of failure.

Everywhere. Every time. For every user.

BMC Helix solutions unlock business value by delivering elevated experiences to employees, customers, developers, and technology partners while achieving operational excellence.

How does BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management do it? We empower enterprises to simplify complexity through intelligent automation and fuel productivity with personalized employee experiences. The solution offers unique value in three ways, as shown below.

Figure 1. Three ways BMC Helix ESM offers unique value.

Let’s start with personalized user experiences. The users of enterprise services—whether employees, customers, DevOps teams, or technology partners—are the heart of any business. BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management solutions such as BMC Helix Innovation Studio, BMC Helix Business Workflows, BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced, and BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio drive employee productivity by delivering a unified service catalog that is accessible on any device. Employees can see results sooner through faster self-service tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled virtual agents, knowledge management, and real-time information swarming.

Automated workflows simplify complexity through intelligent automation. Manual and inefficient processes within the enterprise can result in frustrated employees, dissatisfied customers, and business disruption. When information can be converted into action without manual intervention, and issues can be quickly and effectively addressed and fixed, you can transform how services are managed and scaled.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management takes automation several steps further to foster innovation by:

• Embedding AI, machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) for pervasive automation across applications, workflows, LoBs, and DevOps
• Harnessing BMC HelixGPT, generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) to integrate siloed data sources to derive actionable insights for anomalies and automatically resolve repeat cases
• Supporting agile and more traditional waterfall DevOps practices with embedded change request screens spanning Jira, Azure DevOps, and mainframe tools

Integrated BMC Helix for ServiceOps, the converged platform behind BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management solutions, is a native SaaS solution that enables intelligence, user personalization, and predictive insights with action by orchestrating data, automation, and AI/ML across every touchpoint of the service experience. All BMC Helix solutions, including chatbots and BMC HelixGPT, are pre-integrated within the BMC Helix platform for accelerated deployment.

When you choose BMC as your service management partner, you gain a unified enterprise and IT service management platform and the power to expand across any LoBs, giving your enterprise a true business advantage.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management simplifies complexity, integrates any data source or app quickly, streamlines deployments, and delivers service management experiences the way you want. And that’s just the beginning. To learn more, please download our complimentary e-book, Simplify Complexity with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, here.

Your employees sit at the center of meeting service expectations for all users—internal and external customers and ecosystem partners. The digital employee experience (DEX) encompasses every aspect of your employee’s interaction with enterprise service management technology, from quality, ease of use, availability, security, and reliability But it also encompasses inclusivity, accessibility, and other aspects of the end-user experience.

BMC Helix Employee Experience solutions, part of the BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management portfolio, enable success at every phase of the employee journey. Enterprise service management quality of experience (QoE) is compromised when your employees face difficult-to-navigate internal channels of support, redundant and manual processes across lines of business (LoBs), out-of-date information, cumbersome fulfillment workflows, and an inability to work with minimal disruption. The adverse impact on the enterprise is low productivity, additional toil, and staff turnover.

The employee experience solutions are designed to fuel productivity by empowering all of your employees—wherever they are—with the tools they need for success and improved job satisfaction, including:

• A transparent, seamless employee onboarding experience to accelerate time to value, orchestrated through BMC Helix HR Service Management
• Automated workflows to save time across LOBs, data, and processes
• The speed and convenience of employee self-service
• Collaboration and communication tools and a unified service catalog that are accessible to employees anytime, anywhere, on any device
• Actionable insights, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), accessible in real time, to resolve inquiries from customers and internal teams
• Proactive resolution of problems and cases before they impact the customer or the business
• Easy collaboration and communication across teams through integration with BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced and Studio, BMC Helix Virtual Agent, BMC Helix ITSM’s ChatOps capability, and BMC Helix Knowledge Management

To learn more about BMC Helix’s employee experience solutions, visit our Elevate Digital Employee Solutions site.

Companies have learned from the business changes hastened by the pandemic that they must continue to drive modernization across data and business processes to meet needs of the always-on, increasingly digital-first economy. One foregone conclusion is that siloed, traditional IT service management and operations management (ITSM-ITOM) tools and processes are falling short in delivering the necessary speed, agility, and automation to remain competitive.

When service management and service operations functions exist and operate independently of one another across the enterprise, they result in limited capabilities and require manual, more labor-intensive efforts. Moreover, the integrations often required to bridge their respective functions are also manual, time-consuming, and expensive, which is further complicated by the proliferation of data, applications, and architectures spanning multi-cloud, data centers, mainframe, and the edge.

So, what is the answer? ServiceOps, commonly defined as the merging of service management and operations management, is an approach gaining traction with companies as part of their digital transformation journeys. According to a recent Hanover Research study commissioned by BMC, 73 percent of those surveyed currently combine ITSM-ITOM functions into a single centralized team for incident management (63 percent), problem management (62 percent), and service resolution (59 percent), with two-thirds well on their way to full integration.

What is BMC’s Approach to ServiceOps?

BMC’s approach to ServiceOps is rooted in the BMC Helix platform, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at its core. It’s a complete, integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) digital transformation engine that converges ITSM-ITOM and modernizes processes and workflows for both teams, empowering organizations to accelerate DevOps; leverage intelligence for faster, better decision-making; and strengthen collaboration.

Additional benefits include:

• Unifying data and workflows throughout hybrid cloud environments, minimizing manual, repetitive processes, and increasing the speed to desired business outcomes
• Spending less time reactively responding to incidents and proactively resolving them before they impact the business through integrated cross-platform AI/ML, intelligent automation, and predictive service management in concert with other BMC Helix solutions
• Automating processes and reducing silos to foster collaboration across IT, lines of business, product teams, and customers

In market and ready to deploy now, ServiceOps enabled by BMC Helix is already paying dividends for our customers.

BMC Helix makes it easy to start your ServiceOps journey now. With a ServiceOps approach, you can accelerate new product development, time-to-market, and revenue growth; activate, deliver, and manage always-on products or services; and rapidly reduce the number and impact of incidents—and their corresponding business risk. All of that helps improve the customer experience, and customer retention, which then improves profitability, too.

Learn more about how a ServiceOps approach and BMC Helix can help you achieve desired business outcomes and adapt to market changes faster—starting today—at bmc.com/serviceops.