IT professionals don’t need to be convinced that silos are a problem. Most of us have lived that reality: the service desk doesn’t have visibility into operations, operations teams aren’t looped in on service priorities, and tickets, alerts, and metrics are disconnected and delayed. Everyone works hard, often heroically, but coordination is reactive, and the gaps show up in ways that users and the business always notice.
When the term “ServiceOps” entered the conversation a few years ago, it referred to the unification of IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM). It resonated immediately. It made sense to many different teams.
ServiceOps poses the challenge: “Let’s finally fix the divide between service and ops teams. Let’s stop reacting to incidents in separate systems with incomplete data. Let’s combine automation, observability, and workflows so that we can understand what’s happening across the IT estate and take action—before users are affected.”
The concept is sound. The potential is real. And as recent EMA research shows, the momentum behind ServiceOps is strong.
But the same research also makes something else very clear: ServiceOps still has a long way to go.
The Good News: ServiceOps is Gaining Ground
In our 2025 EMA report “Redefining Modern Service Management: ServiceOps, ESM, and the Rise of AI-Powered Services,” nearly six in ten of the respondents to our survey report have formal ServiceOps initiatives, and about one-third say they are already advanced or fully implemented. That’s a significant increase over just one year ago.
Even more encouraging is that 90% of IT leaders agree that AIOps and automation, which are core capabilities in most ServiceOps platforms, are increasing efficiency, streamlining resolution, and improving service delivery. Sixty-six percent say their ITSM and ITOps teams already work closely with DevOps, while 63% report active collaboration with site reliability engineering (SRE) groups.
These are all strong indicators of progress. They reflect real investment, and they show that organizations are committed to the idea of unified service and operations.
But despite this momentum, the day-to-day experience inside many IT teams still tells a more complicated story.
The Reality: We’re Still Wrestling with the Hard Stuff
Here’s what else the research found:
- Only 38% of IT leaders report shared ownership across ITSM, ITOps, and ESM platforms
- Just 31% say a single stakeholder group still controls their environments
- More than 50% cite “integration with monitoring and observability tools” as a key requirement for ServiceOps platforms because integration is still difficult
- While more than 50% define their IT services in terms of business functions, the rest still organize around technology silos
Perhaps most telling of all: when asked what prevents the expansion of automation and ServiceOps maturity, leaders cited technical complexity, tool sprawl, and legacy systems. Of course, these are the same issues that ServiceOps was meant to solve in the first place. That doesn’t mean the concept is flawed; it means we’ve reached the inflection point at which theory meets reality.
Why It’s Taking Time
The barriers are understandable.
Unlike DevOps, which emerged around a focused delivery pipeline, ServiceOps spans a broader, messier landscape. It must reconcile different tools, different teams, different traditions and, increasingly, different data models. Service management workflows are highly structured. Ops and observability environments are often fluid and event-driven. Pulling them together requires more than intention; it takes real operational change.
Today, most organizations are still running many different tools across ITSM, monitoring, automation, and analytics. CMDBs may not reflect current environments. Observability platforms and service desks may operate in separate silos. And while leaders are pushing for platform unification, 52% say that integration, rather than innovation, is now their top platform requirement. That’s because tool sprawl is slowing them down. Even where the strategy is clear, the execution remains complex.
Where We See Progress
Despite the challenges, the direction is promising. The same EMA research also shows that organizations with maturing ServiceOps practices are:
- Seeing measurable improvements in incident resolution time and service uptime
- Using AI to drive predictive alerts, ticket routing, and contextual automation
- Investing in shared dashboards and unified data models
- Reorienting teams around business-aligned service definitions, not just technical domains
In 2025, 54% of respondents said their ServiceOps programs had been in place for one to two years. Thirty-four percent said they’ve been running them for longer. These aren't pilots anymore; they're real initiatives tied to real outcomes. On top of that, 53% of those respondents report those outcomes as "very positive."
What Comes Next
We’re at the stage when ServiceOps needs to get more concrete, not just a unifying idea, but a common model, supported by integrated platforms, shared metrics, and real-time context, that both service and operations teams can act on together.
This means that organizations should:
- Break down data silos between monitoring, observability, and ITSM
- Invest in automation that supports both structured workflows and dynamic operations
- Adopt shared service definitions that align with business outcomes
- Apply AI, not just for alerts and triage, but also to orchestrate resolution and continuously improve
Most importantly, it means accepting that maturity is a journey. ServiceOps isn't a product to buy or a quick initiative to complete; it’s an operational realignment. It’s one that takes time, support, and cross-functional commitment.
EMA’s Take
The value of ServiceOps isn’t in question. It represents one of the most important shifts in enterprise IT since the emergence of cloud and automation. It promises better collaboration, faster resolution, fewer outages, and more resilient services. It supports outcomes that matter to the business, not just metrics that matter to IT.
But it’s also a signpost. The term itself exists because we’re still trying to solve a problem that’s been with us for years. Teams often work in parallel, but sometimes, they don’t work as effectively as they could together. Cross-collaboration should become a priority.
The good news? The situation is changing. Teams are getting together as never before. It’s still imperfect and uneven, but real progress has been made in just the past year. This is what will make ServiceOps not just a label, but also a new standard for how IT delivers value.
