Modern IT Service Management is Transforming Managed Services - Part 1

Let’s be honest: the way we deliver IT services has changed more in the past five years than in the previous two decades. If you’re still relying on old-school, infrastructure-heavy models, you’re probably feeling the pressure to keep up.

I’ve spent over 20 years in the trenches building, scaling and reinventing managed services for organizations of all sizes. What I’ve learned is simple: embracing modern service management (MSM) isn’t just a technical upgrade for IT; it’s a mindset shift that you must experience if you want to unlock real business value.

Let’s dig into what MSM means, why it matters and how you can start applying the principles right now.

Why shift to modern service management?

Remember the days when IT was the gatekeeper, controlling every server and every process? Those days are gone. Today, business units can spin up cloud services with a credit card. And IT’s role is evolving rapidly. Traditional IT service management (ITSM) frameworks — built for on-premises, manual environments — can’t keep up with the speed and flexibility that modern organizations demand.

MSM flips the script. Instead of just keeping the lights on, IT becomes a strategic partner, driving agility, innovation and outcomes that matter to your business.

Thought starter: Ask yourself:

• Is our IT team adding real value or just maintaining the status quo?
• Where could automation free up your people to focus on what really matters?

What’s different about MSM design principles?

• Customer value first: Every activity should create business value. If it doesn’t, why are you still doing it? At Rackspace Technology, we put automation, self-service and rapid deployment front and center. We call it the Fanatical Experience®.
• Design for resilience: Failure happens. MSM says to plan for it, recover fast and keep moving. It’s about building systems that bounce back, not just systems that never break.
• Zero-touch automation: The less manual intervention, the better. Automation isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the engine of speed, quality and predictability.

Idea to try: Map out your top five manual processes.

• How many could be automated or streamlined?
• What would that free up for your team?
• Does your organization have the skill to automate the processes?
• What would you do if it didn’t?

Turning MSM principles into action the modern way

Let’s get practical. Here’s how I’ve seen MSM principles come to life in organizations and how you can aim for the same results.

Business relationship management

• Old approach: IT builds custom solutions in a vacuum, hoping they’ll fit a business need.
• Modern approach: IT and business units work as partners, co-creating services that move the needle. At Rackspace, we form cross-functional teams with organizations and have seen their public cloud adoption increase within the first year.

Quick win: Set up regular service design sessions with business stakeholders and trusted advisors, like Rackspace. Make them part of your process, not just the end user or a procurement division.

Capacity management

• Old approach: Guesswork and manual provisioning often led to wasted resources.
• Modern approach: Use cloud-native tools to scale up or down in real time. Automated monitoring keeps costs in check and resources optimized.

Quick win: Review your cloud usage monthly. Are you paying for capacity you don’t need? Are you unsure where to even begin? We have solutions to help.

Availability and continuity

• Old approach: Redundancy and manual recovery plans were the norm.
• Modern approach: Built-in resiliency and automated failover are now standard. In my experience, automating deployments cuts manual workloads by 40% and boosts uptime.

Quick win: Automate your failover testing. Document your recovery steps as code, not just in a binder.

Information security and compliance

• Old approach: Security was all about networks and manual audits.
• Modern approach: Focus has shifted to identity and data, with proactive, automated controls. Cloud-native compliance tools make audits less painful and more effective.

Quick win: Automate compliance checks. Shift your security focus to identity management.

Financial management

• Old approach: Incur huge, centralized budgets and little transparency.
• Modern approach: Move to usage-based, opex-focused financial models. Cloud platforms give you real-time financial data. Use it.

Quick win: Empower product owners to manage their own budgets. Use cloud cost management tools to track and optimize spending.

Service level and lifecycle management

• Old approach: Custom SLAs and slow product-focused iterations.
• Modern approach: Standardized SLAs focused on user experience (XLAs) and agile, continuously optimized services.

Quick win: Define experience-level agreements that measure what users care about. Iterate quickly. Improve often. Find what works. Discard what doesn’t.

Service operations reimagined

Here’s where things get exciting. MSM isn’t just about delivery. It’s about how you operate day-to-day.

• Self-service and automation: Ditch the manual ticketing. Give users self-service portals and automate the workflows behind them.
• Automated configuration and change management: Use automated discovery and service mapping. Build continuous delivery pipelines with built-in controls.
• Unified cloud management: Manage everything from a single platform. Break down silos and eliminate manual tasks.

Ideas to spark change

• Launch a self-service portal for common IT requests.
• Use infrastructure as code for configuration management.
• Build CI/CD pipelines for every release.

Management and support capabilities

• Dynamic service catalogs: Offer pre-approved, business-aligned services that users can provision on demand.
• Real-time monitoring and remediation: Monitor at the service level and automate fixes for common issues.
• Process automation: Automate end-to-end across IT functions to accelerate delivery and reduce errors.

Ideas to implement

• Curate a service catalog with standardized offerings.
• Integrate monitoring tools that trigger automated fixes.
• Assign champions to drive automation across the organization.

Wrapping up: lay the groundwork for intelligent operations

MSM may seem like a merely a trend. But it’s the foundation for delivering managed services that are agile, resilient and truly aligned with your business goals. By embracing MSM principles and leveraging cloud-native capabilities, you can break free from legacy constraints and open the window of opportunity to innovation and growth.

Final questions to consider

• Where could automation make the biggest impact in your organization?
• How can IT and business units collaborate more closely?
• What metrics reflect the value your services deliver?
• Are you making the most of cloud-native tools for security, compliance and cost management?

What’s next?

In part two, I share insight on how AI and intelligent operations are taking IT service management to the next level. Stay tuned to discover how to make your IT operation predictive, proactive and continuously improving.

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