Siddharth specialises in driving marketing campaigns and customer education programs for ManageEngine’s flagship ITSM platform, ServiceDesk Plus. Over the past four years, Siddharth has hosted various masterclass and thought leadership webinars addressing specific ITSM challenges that organisations face and the best practices to overcome them.

 Learn more about Siddharth before he takes to the stage at SITS to deliver the seminar ‘The service management evolution model: Is it worth chasing ITSM maturity today?’

How did you get into the IT industry?

My foray into the world of IT was serendipitous! Straight out of college with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, I landed an opportunity to interview with ManageEngine for a product marketing role in its ITSM division. This role was right at the intersection of my interest in technology, my proficiency in process engineering, and my love for literature.

Since then, I have worked on content for ManageEngine’s customers, hosted webinars on how IT teams can solve pressing ITSM challenges, and represented ManageEngine at multiple seminars and events like SITS. I enjoy hypothesising about what the future of service management will look like. My seminar at SITS 2023 was on charting a new future for ITSM, with data science and ML being the drivers of innovation.

What do you love most about your job?

I love being able to connect with diverse stakeholders such as product managers, engineers, IT technicians, managers, and CIOs. This way, I am able to surface the most pressing ITSM problems and concoct the best ways to solve them with ManageEngine solutions. I also get the opportunity to communicate the latest market trends and demands to internal stakeholders while helping our customers and other IT organisations get the most value out of our ITSM platforms.

What do you think the biggest ITSM trends will be in the coming years?

  1. A reduction in tool sprawl: IT teams across organisations of all sizes and types will seek to unify their tech stack for the sake of simplicity and cost optimisation. The past decade has seen IT teams adopt a number of siloed tools for addressing specific parts of their IT management strategy. While this approach has helped modernise their ITSM efforts, shifting economic headwinds and the C-suite’s focus on value will see the consolidation of IT tool sets.

  1. Security-centric service management: According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, “the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million.” As threat actors proliferate and target employee credentials, unpatched workstations, and standing privileges, IT teams will embrace security-centric service management workflows that are orchestrated across ITSM, UEMS, IAM, and PAM solutions.

  1. GenAI and AI-driven workflow automation: With the accelerated adoption of GenAI, ITSM teams have quickly realised productivity gains in the areas of collaboration and knowledge management. From ticket summarisation to helpful, GenAI-powered chatbots, IT teams are moving fast to roll out GenAI capabilities for both IT technicians and end users. In the coming years, ITSM teams will leverage new age AI and ML advancements in workflow management to build service workflows on the fly instead of crafting static ones.

What can visitors expect from your seminar session at SITS?

In my seminar, I will discuss why we need to move away from the ITSM maturity models that have been the dominant tools for improving service management processes, capabilities, talent, and tool sets. These ITSM maturity models, while helpful when it comes to understanding an IT team’s baseline capabilities, remain snapshots—static sets of phases that do not account for evolving capabilities, the economic landscape, and new technology breakthroughs, among other things.

I will also share an alternative approach: the service management evolution model. This posits that there cannot be an end state to service management maturity in the face of changes, both within the enterprise and in the external tech and business landscapes.

What are you most looking forward to at SITS?

I visited SITS for the first time last year, and the interactions I had with IT veterans, leaders, and service desk managers are still etched in my memory! I am excited to meet up with friends, old and new, and I look forward to exchanging insights about what the future holds for service management, especially against the backdrop of the accelerated pace of innovation.

See Siddharth speak at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 17-18th April 2024, ExCeL London. You can now register for your free ticket here.