By: Nishi Ratnam, Lead- AIOPS Point Solutions Industrialization, ACE, LTIMindtree

Disruptions to usual ways of working are as old as the existence of the universe itself. Disruptions test the resilience of species and their ability to endure. Those who survive these disruptions are deemed “the fittest to survive.”

With this philosophical underpinning, let us talk about incident management, an IT process that comes into play when the usual ways of working are disrupted. Incidents are disruptions to usual ways of working. They come with varying priorities and criticalities based on the business impact they carry. The ideal approach would be to minimize disruptions, and thanks to various monitoring tools and sophisticated AI/ML-backed platforms, we have solutions to achieve this. However, there have been ongoing disruptions to the usual ways of working. With IT infrastructure becoming increasingly complex and IT becoming the backbone of every process across industries like banking, manufacturing, retail, etc., managing disruptions and emerging resilient is paramount. While IT has achieved scale and empowered technological advancements, incidents have become more complex. Even a single error in a configuration item (CI) can have an unimaginable impact on various layers of your IT process, and the financial ramifications of small disruptions can be far-reaching. The future of incident management presents many complexities, given these evolving paradigms.

Rethinking the incident response management process is essential for organizations to respond to such incidents. With this process in place, organizations must be able to:

• Predict incidents and thwart their occurrence
• Identify root causes of disruptions accurately
• Respond and resolve incidents at lightning speed
• Security and data breaches are completely minimized

Emerging market trends in incident management

We already have several sophisticated AIOPS platforms that proactively handle incident occurrences, like Dynatrace, ScienceLogic, Datadog, and Canvas AIOPS. These platforms offer sophisticated monitoring capabilities and can swiftly correlate anomalies from anywhere and everywhere to probable incidents.

While prevention is always better than cure, incident occurrences also must be handled smartly. Hence, IT service management (ITSM) tools have also begun focusing on resolving incidents with speed and accuracy and tapping into lessons from past incidents to get better incident responses with each iteration. The incident management market is now clearly segregated into proactive incident management and incident response solutions. The market for incident management has witnessed an unprecedented expansion with a projected CAGR of 11% in the next ten years.

AI/ML capabilities of ITSM tools

To grab a share of this growing market size, ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Freshservice, BMC Helix, ManageEngine, etc., enable their incident management modules with AI/M for both proactive incident management and better incident response.

Is it easy to invest in AI/ML-enabled capabilities of ITSM tools?

While growing AI/ML capabilities in ITSM is the need of the hour, it must also be mentioned that most of these capabilities require a huge investment. For example, a  standard ServiceNow package costs about USD 30,000 per year and USD 100 per user per month. The pro version, including AI/ML capabilities, costs about USD 60,000 annually. With AI and ML capabilities doubling the costs, many organizations would like to rationalize/optimize their financial spending if IT is not their core business.

Experts suggest that before investing, it is important to clearly understand what needs to be achieved and what the most important problem is. Additionally, planning for incremental investment in AI/ML capabilities with timely ROI realization is crucial.

Point Solutions: A favorable investment to begin with

Expanding incident management space has enough room for many tools, platforms, and point solutions. The benefit of these solutions is that they are a good starting point, promising ROI realization while not burning a hole in your pocket. Most of these point solutions cater to a small problem statement. They encourage clients to identify the interconnectedness between their processes and how fixing one problem can have a spiraling effect on the other. At this stage, they are ready to take a giant leap of faith in investing in an AIOPS  platform or ITSM capability.

Let us consider the example of incident communication management space that is at the crux of incident response. ITSM tools offer some capabilities in this space but require a huge investment for an upgraded version. If communication process improvement is your most burning problem, explore i-MIM (intelligent major incident manager that can also be used for P2, P3, or any other incidents.) It is a bot-based solution with minimal infra requirements. An i-MIM enables:

• Automated part-filled email communication
• Automated ITSM updates
• A single channel for seamless collaboration that pulls in the required stakeholders automatically
• Reports and dashboards to track incident-related metrics
• Automated MIR/RCA generation

Conclusion

The growing sophistication and size of the incident management market have fostered the development of platforms, ITSM solutions, point solutions, and a plethora of offerings in the market. It is also being observed that organizations need more than one lever to bring in AI/ML capabilities in the growing complexity of IT environments. It is also important to consider the challenges, including cost, not knowing where to make the first move, data privacy laws, etc. Keeping the approach incremental, strategic, and clearly defined ROI realization timelines would be smart measures. While your ITSM may be capable of doing a lot, you can still take a leap with point solutions before blind diving into the AI/ML maze. At LTIMindtree ACE, we call our point solutions LEAP solutions—Light, Economical, AI-enabled Point solutions—that help you take a leap into AI-driven IT management. The future of incident management space is a never-expanding space for diverse capabilities and solutions to exist and work in tandem! Point solutions are one such optimistic capability.

References

Incidence Management Software Market Overview 2022-2032, Future Market Insights: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/incidence-management-software-market