EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

UEM for user experience management and RPA for robotic process automation are two IT acronyms that continue to elude well-understood definitions, albeit for somewhat opposite reasons. UEM goes back decades, first emerging out of primarily network-centric management, becoming a cornerstone of business service management, and later being consumed by application performance management (APM) much to its own detriment. RPA is comparatively recent, evolving out of screen scraping into far richer technical options that are diverse in nature, with many RPA vendors contending with and replacing the more consultancy-driven platforms for business process management (BPM).

In the course of researching, documenting and advising on user experience management needs and directions for more than a decade, I’ve found myself waging a quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) war with several industry assumptions. Chief among these is the notion that user experience management (UEM) is purely a subset of application performance management (APM). This APM-centricity misses some of UEM’s most critical value points, and in a basic sense fails to recognize what UEM is truly about.

I admit, “end-user support” sounds kind of old-fashioned. But in many respects just the opposite is true. In the digital age the need for easy access to new services is on the rise, and even with a much ‘hipper’ (and increasingly impatient) end-user population, the need for support and guidance remains. It is just taking different forms than in the past.

The growing market for analytics in IT is one of the more exciting areas to watch in the technology industry. Exciting because of the variety and types of vendor innovation in this area. And exciting as well because our research indicates the adoption of advanced IT analytics supports data sharing and joint decision making in a way that’s catalytic for both IT and digital transformation.

Optimizing the end-user experience has many dimensions to it, and one key element of them is ensuring that any issues from password reset, to application access, to support for multiple endpoints by a single user—are all addressed without your users feeling that they’re queuing up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. This blog leverages EMA research to examine how a truly efficient service desk can make itself all the more effective by becoming more transparent, less verbally visible, and yet ultimately far more end-user empowering.

This is my second blog targeting the next generation of IT service management, or ITSM 2.0. The first blog described the characteristics I see as defining ITSM 2.0. Here we’ll look more closely at the key challenges you might face in getting there from a more traditional ITSM background.

Over the course of numerous deployment dialogs and multiple research projects starting with last year’s work on “ITSM futures,” I have been tracking a still largely unheralded phenomenon: ITSM teams in many organizations are evolving to take a leadership role in helping all of IT become more efficient, more business aligned, and ever more relevant [...]

Digital and user experience management has been the focus of multiple EMA research studies throughout the years, both as a stand-alone topic and as part of EMA’s ongoing examination of critical trends such as digital and operational transformation, IT performance optimization, and of course application performance management (APM).  In many respects, optimizing the digital experience [...]

While service catalogs are not new, they are becoming increasingly critical to enterprises seeking to optimize IT efficiencies, service delivery and business outcomes. They are also a way of supporting both enterprise and IT services, as well as optimizing IT for cost and value with critical metrics and insights. In this blog we’ll look at [...]

Cloud is no longer a new topic for IT, or for IT service management (ITSM). But its impact on how ITSM teams work, as well as on how IT works overall, has probably never been greater. Indeed, more and more IT organizations have been “moving to the cloud.” But understanding its relevance can’t be achieved [...]