News

AI is amongst us (finally!)

AI is beginning to be and will continue to be more important for organisations in 2019. It will begin to impact service management in general, but particularly around data science and conversational AI (Chatbots, virtual assistants, etc.) It’s now becoming mainstream, and as it becomes embedded into service management products, it’s value is increasingly obvious.

90% of the data ever created on our planet has been created in the last 5 years. Data-driven decision making is crippled without a mechanism for handling such huge volumes of data, and traditional Business Intelligence techniques simply can’t scale. AI – and specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), deep neural networks and a healthy dose of statistical analysis – can shine a light into the dark.

Over the last couple of years compute power, which  Machine Learning requires a lot of, has become not only vastly cheaper but also quicker to access using Cloud providers. Our ability to absorb data has gone through the roof in terms of being able to store and capture it at a reduced cost. Therefore, with the ability to capture data more easily, and the accuracy of the data being absorbed, machine learning is suddenly becoming very applicable to many more fields and applications within the service management space.

AI will continue to get better in 2019, and it’s becoming real. It will help organisations improve upon their knowledge of how best to get the most out of the services they offer, in a much more cost-effective way. But it can also be targeted to solve particular (defined) problems with the use of AI algorithms, which are only getting smarter. There will be a lot of exciting and new ways of how organisations can use AI in 2019 and in the future.

A change of mindset – The rise of Digital Services

Organisations are starting to look at digital services and in 2019 the reality of having to provide digital services will start to dawn on many more of them. The IT department will have to respond to this by transforming themselves to be less project-centric to more digital product-centric. They will have to start thinking about having the capabilities in place to align themselves to run digital services which underpin the business. In the new world or disrupt or be disrupted, organisations will have to start to provide digital services for their customers to consume to stay ahead of their game and to remain competitive within the market place.

It’s a change of mindset for IT. They will have to get into the mode of running these digital services on behalf of the organisation, emphasising a much greater interaction between the business and IT.

Manage costs and capacity when moving to the Cloud

Moving to the Cloud is really beginning to hit home with most organisations today, and with Gartner and IDC predicting that most organisations will not have a data centre in 2025, we will see a spike in Cloud adoption in 2019.

Organisations were originally very sceptical on the security implications in placing their services into the Cloud. However, Cloud adoption has come of age and organisations are beginning to trust the Cloud providers much more than their own network security. With this change, many more organisations have a cloud strategy, or at least an initiative in place which will come to fruition in 2019 and beyond.

What we will also see much more of in 2019 is organisations beginning to wake up to the fact that they cannot afford not to manage their cloud well. Cloud adoption will force better management in terms of looking strategically on what is being used and how best to utilise their services within the Cloud to optimise overall cost. Capacity management is becoming more important than it ever was in the data centre and cloud cost control is critical in 2019 and beyond.

Gary Pruden
CTO, Fusion GBS