Get to know a bit about Akshay Anand, Principal Solutions Engineer at Atlassian before he takes the stage at SITS for his seminar ‘Embracing Agile ITSM.‘

 1. How did you get into the IT profession (or IT support)?

I’ve always been interested in process and operations management. It was a specialisation while at university, and I always thought I’d have a career in operations & logistics. However, I graduated just as the US went into recession in 2002 and I landed a job to help a BMC Remedy partner expand into the US. They put me through ITIL v2 Foundation course and I realised that there was an opportunity to bring my interest in processes and flow into the world of IT & ITSM. I changed roles to become an ITSM consultant. The rest, as they say, is history.

 2. What tips would you give Service Desk & IT Support Professionals looking to drive their IT services forward?

I believe that ITSM is undergoing a painful generational shift, as incumbent ways of working are being upended due to significant technological and human shifts both in the work and consumer domains. One of the reasons that IT service teams & professionals find themselves in this situation is chronic organisational underinvestment in learning and improvement, especially when they were treated as cost centres rather than value centres.

So my advice is this – never stop learning (or encouraging your teams to learn) and finding ways to apply that knowledge. Yes, it takes time and it will consume some of your budget, but it will yield multiple returns – from higher employee morale & productivity, to resilient products and services that better fit customer needs. And don’t just look to traditional ITSM domains for learning either – two of the most (for me) world-changing things I’ve learned in the last 5 years have been Cynefin and Wardley Mapping, neither of which have much to do with IT services.

 3. In your opinion, what are the most innovative technology products on the market right now?

The technology that comes to mind immediately is generative AI, whether that’s Chat-GPT, Sydney, Bard, and a host of others besides. There is a compelling use case of plugging them into your corporate knowledge and collaboration platforms so they can provide users with not just search results, but with actual answers that can string together multiple search results covering different topics. That’s the difference between searching for the page on expense reimbursements, and being able to ask “can I expense my taxi from my hotel?” and get the correct & comprehensive answer (involving policies, exceptions, submission process, etc.) back without involving a knowledgeable person or manager. The impact of this technology on knowledge management – and by extension, on self-service portals, ITSM, and ESM – is something I am very excited about.

  4. What are you most looking forward to at SITS 2022?

I know this is a cliche, but after COVID and the economic slowdowns that followed, it’s going to be a delight to see other ITSM-ers face to face! There are many interesting conversations to be had – from new features and solutions in ITSM, to governance and ways of working, remote working and the return to the office, and even to mental health in ITSM.

 5. What have you got in store for your session?

I’ve been fascinated for a number of years about what “agile ways of working” means to ITSM. Traditionally, people have pointed to the “rituals” of agile – standups, retros, and so on – but these make sense when working in timeboxed planned increments. That’s not necessarily how IT operations or IT service management works. So I’m going to talk about how we take the lessons and the spirit of agility and re-contextualise them for ITSM. I heard that another speaker is going to focus on how to recontexualise ITSM for agile software developers, so I think between the two of us, we’ll have explored the topic of “agile ITSM” from all angles!