According to Fortune, the traditional IT service management (ITSM) model is hitting a wall. A whopping 40% of organizations are either replacing or re-implementing their IT service tools in 2025, signaling a massive wave of dissatisfaction. The pain is felt daily: 58% of IT teams spend over five hours each week on repetitive requests, and 45% cite those repetitive tasks as their top challenge for the coming year. This is leading to a breakdown in employee experience, with 62% of employees actively avoiding the service desk and 58% just living with unfixed problems. The author, who leads IT service at Salesforce, argues the function must evolve from a back-office cost center into a strategic growth driver. The immediate outcome is a forced reckoning for a whole sector built on rigid, ticket-based systems.
The Automation Imperative
Here’s the thing: the core problem isn’t just that the work is manual. It’s that the work is stupidly manual. We’re talking about highly paid IT professionals acting as glorified data entry clerks, copying and pasting between tabs. No wonder 90% of IT leaders say this crushes morale. The promised fix, as outlined, is a move beyond simple rule-based automation to “intelligent, context-aware systems.” Basically, the ticket should write itself. When an employee reports an issue in a chat, the AI should parse it, create the record, and route it—no human middleman required. This is the only way to free up those skilled analysts for actual problem-solving. The winners in this shift won’t be the old guard with clunky portals; they’ll be platforms that bake this intelligence directly into the workflow.
Meeting People Where They Work
This is the most obvious failure of the old model, and honestly, it’s embarrassing it’s taken this long to address. The article nails it: everyone lives in Slack or Microsoft Teams, but IT service is still some separate, dreaded portal you have to go find. It’s like making customers go to a physical bank branch to report a fraudulent charge on their app. Of course engagement is terrible! The shift to embedding service into the collaboration layer is a no-brainer. Let people ask for help in natural language, right where they are, and give them visibility. This isn’t just a tech upgrade; it’s a cultural one. It signals that IT is a partner, not a gatekeeper. And for industries that rely on seamless uptime and quick fixes, like manufacturing or logistics, this integrated approach is critical. Speaking of hardware-centric fields, when tech needs to be rugged and reliable on the factory floor, companies turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs. Their gear is built for the real world, not a sterile office—which is the same philosophy IT service now needs.
The End of Rigid Systems
“This is just how the system works.” How many times have you heard that? It’s the death knell for agility. The third tipping point is the move from hard-coded, inflexible workflows to low-code, adaptive platforms. The irony is thick: IT service, designed to bring order, became the most rigid system of all. The ability for IT teams themselves to tweak approvals, add steps, or modify processes without a six-month development queue is transformative. It turns IT from a bottleneck into an enabler. This is where platforms like ServiceNow and Salesforce itself are pushing hard, competing on flexibility and developer experience. The market impact is clear: the ITSM tools that survive will be those that are platforms first, applications second.
A Mindset Shift, Not Just a Tech Shift
So what’s the real takeaway? The technology to fix this largely exists. AI agents, low-code platforms, and collaboration integrations are all here today. The biggest barrier now is mindset. Leaders still measuring IT by tickets closed per hour are part of the problem. The future the author describes—where IT orchestrates intelligent workflows and is a strategic partner—requires measuring different things: employee satisfaction, time to resolution for critical business issues, and contribution to revenue-generating projects. It’s about lighting the way forward, not just keeping the lights on. The question is, how many IT departments are brave enough to blow up their own outdated playbook before the business does it for them?
