Inspiration Zone - onITnow

A major incident costs you for every minute it lacks direction

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:27:12 GMT

How to limit impact, costs, and reputational damage

Service management is aimed at preventing disruptions as much as possible and ensuring the continuity of service delivery. However, every organization knows that disruptions can never be completely ruled out. No matter how well processes are designed: major incidents are inevitable.

And when they occur, the impact is felt immediately:

disruption of critical processes
high pressure on IT and operations
rising costs due to downtime and inefficiency
risk of reputational damage toward customers and stakeholders

Yet, we see that many organizations are insufficiently prepared. Not because there are no processes in place, but because those processes prove unable to withstand the pressure of a major incident in practice.

Responding under pressure requires orchestration

During a major incident, immediate action is required. Where things often go wrong is not the willingness to respond, but the lack of orchestration the moment everything starts moving at once.

Technology, people, suppliers, and communication must align within a very short timeframe. If that orchestration is missing, the same pattern almost always emerges:

responsibilities are unclear
communication is insufficient or untimely
actions are duplicated or missed entirely
recovery takes much longer than necessary

As a result, the impact often becomes greater than it needs to be — operationally, financially, and reputationally.

Why this is relevant

Many organizations believe they are prepared for major incidents. Until one actually happens. Then, it often turns out that:

processes are too complex and time-consuming
responsibilities are not clearly assigned
tooling provides insufficient support
communication falls short when it matters most

This webinar demonstrates that while you can never fully prevent incidents, you certainly can control the impact — provided that orchestration, roles, and working methods are properly established.

Who is this webinar for?

This webinar is relevant for:

IT Managers
Service Management Leads
Incident Managers
Operations and Support Leads

When:

📅 May 6th
⏱ 30 minutes
💻 Online using Microsoft Teams

Are Your IT Metrics Misleading?

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:27:11 GMT

Many IT organizations rely on traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to measure success. On paper, everything might look green—tickets are closed on time, systems meet uptime targets, and reports show compliance. Yet end users often experience frustration, delays, and disruptions.

This gap is famously captured by the Watermelon SLA: green on the outside, red on the inside. SLAs are often IT-driven, focusing on individual technical components rather than the overall user experience or business outcomes. Users may technically receive a service “on time,” but still struggle to get real value from it. The pandemic has made this gap even more visible, as remote work and higher expectations put traditional IT models to the test.

Experience Matters: Introducing XLA

Xperience Level Agreements (XLA) are designed to solve this problem by focusing on the actual experience and outcomes for end users. Instead of measuring just response or resolution times, XLA captures the real impact of IT services.

XLA brings together three key types of data:

User experience data: satisfaction, ease of use, perceived value
Operational data: incidents, requests, service events
Technical data: system logs, performance metrics, and alerts

By connecting these data sources, XLA provides a complete view of where users struggle, allowing IT teams to focus on improvements that truly matter.

From Metrics to Mindset: Changing IT Culture

Implementing XLA requires a shift in mindset. IT teams move from asking “Did we meet the SLA?” to “Did this service genuinely help the user?”

This approach encourages:

Collaboration between IT, service providers, and end users
Continuous improvement, driven by real user feedback
Alignment of IT performance with business outcomes, not just technical compliance

It’s about turning data into action and building IT services that create real business value.

Real Results: What XLA Can Deliver

Organizations that adopt XLA see tangible improvements:

✅ Higher user satisfaction – workflows run smoothly, frustration is reduced
✅ Faster problem resolution – IT identifies pain points early and acts proactively
✅ Improved business alignment – services directly support key outcomes
✅ Better communication and transparency – IT and business share a common view of success
✅ Reduced inefficiency – resources are focused on what really matters
✅ Trust in IT – users see IT as a partner, not just a service provider

In short, the frustrations hidden by Watermelon SLAs disappear, and IT becomes a trusted enabler of business success.

Watch the Video to Learn More

🎥 Want to see XLA in action? Discover how these approaches help IT teams deliver real value and measurable outcomes.

Trend 2: AI is not a project

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:27:10 GMT

AI is entering organisations everywhere — yet most companies still misunderstand what it actually is. They frame it as a project, a deployment, a transformation initiative with a beginning and an end. But beneath the dashboards, pilots and roadmaps, something far more structural is happening.

AI is not another system to implement. It is becoming the cognitive infrastructure of the organisation itself. This shift does not simply improve processes. It alters how decisions are made, how hierarchy functions, how responsibility is distributed, and how human value is defined. And once AI moves from “tool” to “foundation,” the logic of the organisation begins to reorganise itself around it.

In this article, you’ll discover:

Why treating AI as a project fundamentally limits its impact
How AI reshapes the cognitive architecture of organisations
What happens when intelligence becomes an infrastructural layer instead of a feature
Why hierarchy, reporting cycles and middle management begin to lose their traditional function
How individuals evolve into mini-organisations supported by a personalised cognitive workforce
And why becoming AI-first is not a technology decision, but a leadership and design choice

As AI moves beneath the surface of tools and workflows, one uncomfortable question emerges: are organisations redesigning themselves for intelligence abundance — or are they still trying to manage it like software?

It is becoming a foundational pillar of the modern organisation

A quiet tension is emerging in many organisations today. On the surface there is excitement around AI: its promise, its visibility, the expectations of shareholders and customers. But underneath that excitement lies uncertainty – a sense that something profound is shifting, while most organisations continue to frame AI as yet another digital project to be managed, scoped, budgeted and eventually completed.

This framing is comforting. It fits established governance structures. It gives leaders the psychological reassurance that AI can be handled the same way they handled cloud migrations, CRM implementations or workflow automation. But the truth is far less convenient:

AI does not fit into the project mindset because it changes the cognitive architecture of the organisation itself.

Where previous technologies enhanced or accelerated existing processes, AI alters the relationship between human judgement, organisational knowledge and execution. And once this is understood, it becomes impossible to keep treating AI as a discrete initiative.

Why organisations continue to misplace AI

The tendency to classify AI as a tool is deeply ingrained. Organisations have spent decades learning to adopt technology in predictable patterns: select a system, assign a team, define a budget, roll it out, stabilise and move on. But AI resists that kind of containment. Not because it is mysterious, but because it operates at a different level entirely.

It is not an application.
It is not a feature.
It is not an upgrade.

AI resembles electricity more than software: a pervasive capability that reshapes the conditions under which all other work happens.

In the industrial era, the introduction of electricity did not change one machine; it changed the logic of production. Factories became faster, more flexible, more scalable. Work reorganised itself around the new infrastructure without waiting for permission.

AI exerts the same kind of influence, except the domain it affects is not physical labour but organisational cognition. It does not merely support decision-making; it becomes a parallel decision-maker. It does not simply improve service; it redefines the very pathway through which questions, problems and tasks move through the company.

It is not a tool in your organisation. It is the beginning of a new organisational substrate.

AI as an infrastructural layer, not a layer on top

AI only delivers its full value when it sits beneath the tools and processes of the organisation, not above them as a bolt-on feature. Traditional organisational architecture forces information to move through people, departments and tools in a linear chain: first-line teams interpret the question, middle layers coordinate, systems log the data, managers interpret reports, directors make decisions. Each layer introduces delay, noise and loss of context.

But when AI becomes the foundational layer, the organisation begins to think faster than any individual. Information flows without distortion. Bottlenecks become visible instead of hidden. Decisions shift from retrospective to immediate. Operational awareness becomes continuous, not periodic.

A CEO no longer waits for a report.
A manager no longer waits for an update.
A department no longer waits for another department to act.
Questions like “How are we performing today?” no longer depend on human synthesis. They are answered directly by the cognitive infrastructure of the organisation.

AI does not remove the need for human thinking. But it does remove the need for the human bottleneck.

When AI changes the basis of work, hierarchy begins to shift

One of the striking consequences of this shift is that organisational hierarchy becomes less rigid and less necessary. This is not something leaders decide; it is something the logic of AI simply exposes.

When routine work is automated, the first line shrinks.
When coordination and interpretation are automated, middle management loses its traditional function.
When decision-making accelerates, the rituals of monthly steering and quarterly reflection become insufficient.

This does not lead to “smaller” organisations. It leads to organisations structured for responsiveness rather than reporting. The work that remains human becomes more relational, more strategic and more interpretive – and far less procedural.

The uncomfortable reality is that not all leaders are prepared for this shift. Those who continue to treat AI as a tool underestimate both its displacement effect and its dependency on organisational redesign. Leaders who are fluent in AI – often younger generations, but not exclusively – treat AI as something far closer to a workforce than a system.

This discrepancy will shape competitiveness more strongly than technology itself.

The human role does not disappear; it changes shape

A narrative often heard is that employees will “orchestrate” AI. It is a pleasant metaphor: humans remain in control, guiding the work of intelligent systems. Yet this is a romantic oversimplification.

AI does not need orchestration for routine interpretation and execution. It performs these tasks more consistently and more rapidly than humans can. What humans retain is not the role of conductor, but something far more valuable: the role of meaning-maker.

Humans remain essential where ambiguity exists, where relationships matter, where ethical or political judgement is required, where conflicting interests must be reconciled, where nuance shapes outcomes more than logic. These domains do not shrink; they become more pronounced. But everything beneath them becomes lighter, faster and increasingly automated.

Individuals become mini-organisations

One of the more profound consequences of AI becoming infrastructural is that each employee gains capabilities that previously required entire teams. An individual can access their own analytical layer, their own operational engine, their own contextual knowledge base and their own coordination mechanisms.

This does not mean employees “do everything themselves.” It means they no longer rely on the machinery of the organisation for every step. They move with greater independence, greater clarity and greater responsibility. Each professional becomes, in effect, a one-person organisation, supported by a personalised cognitive workforce. This is not a vision of a distant future; it is the logical end state of the tools that already exist.

The implications are organisational as much as psychological: responsibility becomes distributed, expertise becomes amplified, and the boundaries of roles become more flexible.

This is not a story of job loss, but of structural evolution

The first domains to shift are predictable: the first line, the knowledge-transfer layer of consulting, and the middle management layer whose tasks revolve around coordination, reporting and translation. These functions do not vanish overnight; rather, their purpose changes.

AI does not eliminate human contribution. It eliminates human friction. The work that remains becomes more human, not less. And the infrastructure beneath that work becomes more intelligent.

The AI-first organisation is not a technological choice – it is a new way of organising

To treat AI as a project is to focus on what can be deployed. To treat AI as an infrastructural pillar is to ask a different question entirely: How should a modern organisation think, operate and decide when intelligence itself becomes abundant?

This is not a matter of software adoption. It is a matter of organisational design, leadership maturity, and the willingness to rethink long-held assumptions about how work flows and how people create value. Some organisations will use AI. A few will become AI-first. The difference between the two will define not only competitiveness, but the lived experience of everyone working inside them.

How do you make your TOPdesk environment future-proof?

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:27:10 GMT

Many organizations use TOPdesk. But only a few truly get the most out of it. In practice, we often see the same challenges arise:

processes that have become unnecessarily complex over time
manual work that prevents effective automation
systems that do not integrate well with each other
no clear development direction for the TOPdesk environment

During the onITnow TOPdesk Webinar on Wednesday, March 18, we will show in 30 minutes how you can make your TOPdesk environment clear, scalable, and future-proof again.
We will share:

which parts of TOPdesk organizations tend to make unnecessarily complex
where automation delivers the greatest return
how to define a clear development direction for your service organization

With 25 years of experience in service management and TOPdesk implementations, we have developed standards that have proven themselves in practice. The webinar lasts 30 minutes and can be attended online via Microsoft Teams. Register now and discover how to use your TOPdesk environment more effectively.

Trend 1: Agentic AI takes over the repetitive.

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:27:09 GMT

AI is spreading rapidly through organizations — yet something more fundamental than technology is shifting. The real change is not in automation, but in the rise of agentic AI: systems that can independently interpret, decide, and act. They operate under uncertainty, understand context, and carry out work end-to-end without continuous human supervision. This shift doesn’t just transform technology. It transforms what work actually is.

In this article, you’ll discover:

Why agentic AI is fundamentally different from automation
What happens when predictability disappears from knowledge work
How human value shifts from execution to judgment and meaning
Why leadership becomes less about position and more about behavior
And why, in AI-driven organizations, the biggest bottleneck may well be human

As AI takes over the routine, one question becomes increasingly unavoidable: what remains for us — and are we truly willing to step into that space?

Humans lead, AI amplifies

As these systems expand into the everyday fabric of organisational work, something subtle yet transformative occurs: the repetitive, predictable and procedural elements of knowledge work begin to dissolve. What remains is a version of work that is far closer to human judgement than to human routine.

This shift forces organisations to confront a fundamental truth: the value of human contribution has never been located in repetition. Repetition was simply the structure built around human limitations – a way to impose reliability in a world where people could not perform at scale, at speed or with complete consistency.

Now that AI can provide that consistency, the protective layer of routine falls away.
Humans meet the true demands of their role again: interpretation, creativity, ethical judgement, emotional nuance, and the capacity to navigate ambiguity. And this raises an uncomfortable question: How many professionals are actually prepared for the parts of work that cannot be automated?

When AI takes over the predictable, it exposes the human gaps that were previously hidden

For decades, organisations have relied on predictable workflows not only to structure work, but to stabilise people. Routine provides a sense of competence. It allows individuals to perform well without confronting deeper questions of judgement or adaptability.
But as AI systems assume the repetitive and interpretive layers of work, individuals are confronted with the aspects of their role that cannot be delegated: the moments where there is no script, where values matter, where trade-offs must be made, where relationships carry more weight than logic.

These are precisely the capabilities many professionals have had little incentive or opportunity to develop. Not because they lack intelligence, but because organisations historically rewarded consistency over depth, compliance over reflection, and predictability over adaptability.

As AI takes over the lower layers of cognition, the higher layers are brought into sharper relief. And with that clarity comes discomfort. AI does not only amplify human potential; it also uncovers human unpreparedness.

Leadership becomes behavioural, not positional

Leadership in an AI-enabled organisation begins to shift in character. It becomes less about title and authority, and more about orientation: the ability to frame problems, interpret tensions, set direction and guide others through uncertainty. Yet this form of leadership is not widely distributed in most organisations. Many leaders have succeeded through expertise accumulated over decades, not through adaptability or reflective practice. They have operated in environments where the pace of change was slower, where hierarchies were stable, and where decisions could be shaped by experience rather than by dynamic data. AI challenges that comfort.

When systems accelerate cognition, the slowest component becomes the human responsible for interpreting or approving decisions. Leadership that relies on control quickly becomes a bottleneck. Leadership that relies on clarity, intention and trust becomes an amplifier.

This will create significant psychological strain for many leaders who have not invested in understanding the emerging technological landscape or in developing the behavioural skills required to operate within it. The sense of authority they derived from experience may feel increasingly fragile in a world where AI systems can outperform human memory, reasoning and pattern recognition.
The challenge is not simply to lead people through change. It is to lead oneself through the erosion of familiar structures.

Agency shifts from structure to the individual

As AI absorbs routine decision-making, individuals gain access to a new kind of autonomy. They no longer rely on managers or departments to interpret information for them; the system itself provides the clarity they need. But this autonomy requires a level of self-direction, maturity and judgement that cannot be assumed.

Some professionals will flourish in this environment. They will work more fluidly, make better decisions and engage more deeply because they are liberated from administrative weight. Others will struggle. The absence of routine may feel like the absence of safety. Without defined processes to rely on, some individuals may feel exposed – unsure where their value lies or how to navigate situations where AI does the “thinking” but humans must still define the “why”.

This is not a matter of capability alone. It is a matter of identity.
AI forces the modern professional to confront a deeper question: What is my contribution when the system no longer depends on my repetition, but on my judgement?

AI does not replace human work – it refines it

What becomes clear in this shift is that AI does not remove the human role; it distils it. The tasks that remain are the ones that have always demanded something fundamentally human: contextual judgement, ethical reasoning, creative synthesis, empathy and relational intelligence, framing and reframing of problems, and the ability to make meaning where data is insufficient.

In an environment where AI performs the predictable with high precision, human contribution becomes more irregular, but also more essential. Work becomes less about filling the day and more about shaping the direction.

AI executes; humans define purpose.
AI amplifies; humans interpret.
AI drives action; humans guide intention.

The partnership is not symmetrical, but it is deeply complementary.

The quiet risk: humans becoming the bottleneck

As AI accelerates the flow of work, the limiting factor becomes the speed and clarity with which people can make sense of that flow. In many organisations, the real bottleneck will not be the technical system but the cognitive capacity of its leaders and professionals.
This is the transformation Trend 1 demands people confront. AI will not only change workflows; it will change self-perception.

It will require individuals to operate at a level of maturity, autonomy and adaptability that many have never been asked to reach. Some will rise with surprising ease; others will need support, development and time. But the most significant risk is not job loss; it is stagnation of human capability.

In a world where AI handles the repetitive, people must become more human, not less.
The real transformation lies not in what AI takes over, but in what it reveals.

How do you give TOPdesk a second life?

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:27:08 GMT

TOPdesk is the heart of the service organization in many companies. A stable and widely used platform where processes, incidents, and requests come together every day. But the IT landscape around it has changed significantly in recent years.
Organizations now work with an increasing number of applications, data sources, vendors, and automation solutions. At the same time, expectations from the business are rising: services must be delivered faster, processes need to become smarter, and AI is increasingly expected to provide support.

From separate integrations to smart orchestration

That’s where challenges often arise. In many organizations, integration still mainly consists of individual connections between systems. Data moves from A to B, tickets are forwarded, and manual steps remain. Technically it works — but it is often fragile, difficult to scale, and insufficient for true end-to-end automation.

Integration alone is no longer enough

During this webinar, we will show why more and more organizations are moving from integration to orchestration — and how this allows you to modernize your existing TOPdesk environment without a costly migration or replacement.

From integrations to orchestration

Where traditional integrations mainly connect applications, orchestration focuses on something different: gaining control over the entire process. The webinar lasts 30 minutes and can be attended online via Microsoft Teams. Would you like to discover how to make TOPdesk more future-proof without replacing the platform? Register for this webinar and discover how to move from separate integrations to smart orchestration.

Zombie service management: priority = impact x urgency

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:26:33 GMT

A zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but is still walking among us. In the service management world you will once in a while meet some of those nasty creatures. In this blog I explain how to recognize and ultimately destroy them.

More than 50 shades of grey
I was recently asked by my wife to give the radiator in our kitchen a new colour, namely grey. In the paint shop, on my request for grey radiator paint, the salesman handed me a little booklet of 5 pages each with 5 columns and 6 rows of miniscule rectangles in a different shade of grey, so 150 in total, with the peremptory demand “Here, choose!”.
An impossible choice. “What would you recommend?” I asked. The salesman had been asked that question often. He opened the booklet on the third page and pointed to the first rectangle: “This is asked for a lot, especially for radiators. Never had anyone come back, who wasn’t satisfied with it.”

Thus it became that shade of grey. Even though I was quite sure that the popularity of this shade had nothing to do with its distinctive look but was all due to its position in the middle of the book and the comforting thought that everyone else had chosen it. This phenomenon is well known in consumer psychology and has been given a beautiful name: “Overchoice“. The consumer with choice overload and who is pressed for time will simply choose the first safe alternative that comes along.
A service desk agent is constantly working against the clock: Taking new calls, registering tickets correctly, immediately trying to find a solution and if that fails, assigning the ticket to the appropriate team …. Thus you don’t want to give a service desk agent any choice overload.

The “Overchoice” trap
And yet this frequently happens. A prioritizing based on the ‘priority = impact x urgency’ algorithm is a painful example of this. This algorithm is still prominent in the 2011 ITIL service operations manual and unfortunately not as an ‘in-memoriam’. Thereby the following guidelines are given: in determining the priority one must take into account how quickly the business needs the solution, the potential financial impact of the incident, the possible impact on the reputation of the business and the potential impact of the breach of law … Duh? How quickly does the business need a solution? Ask the user and he/she will answer you: now! What is the potential financial impact of the incident? Check with 5 people and you’ll get 6 different answers. It’s the poor old service desk agent, who then also has to stop and think about the legal impact of the incident and the impact on the image of the company.

That prioritization based on ‘impact x urgency’ is a horror for our service desk agent under time pressure and under this choice overload he will do what a consumer does: pick the first safe alternative that comes along. Just like I and so many others opt for the grey rectangle on the top left of the third page, the service desk agent will invariably opt for the same impact and urgency codes. Over the course of time the prioritization in such systems becomes flat as a pancake.

The silver bullet for killing this stubborn little monster is the ‘impact’ x ‘service criticality’ algorithm. Not every service is as important or critical, the damage in case of unavailability of the SAP service or the SharePoint service will not be the same; let’s say that in most cases SAP has a higher ‘service criticality’ than SharePoint. We determine that ‘service criticality’ in advance and it’s defined in the ITSM tool configuration. Each incident is linked to a service, so the service desk agent certainly doesn’t need to worry about determining the service criticality. He only determines the impact and you can initially easily keep that simple: impact on 1 or more users, service unavailable or just degraded, combined with a maximum of 4 simple choices.

Converting the priority into an ‘exact’ time limit is the sledge hammer with which you completely neutralize this zombie. ‘Exact’ means that the ITSM tool is able to calculate the resolution time taking into account support hours and holidays. Away with flat queues, your second and third line can now work on the most urgent incidents on the basis of an objective queue.

Urgency – how to deal with it
And what of ‘urgency’, is that concept now dead and buried? Not if you apply this concept correctly. The above algorithm implements your SLAs, your arrangements with the business. It says for example, that if an individual has no access to SAP (impact = medium), we will fix it within the 8 hours. In most cases, this is quite acceptable for the users. But for the financial controller, who has to complete his financial reporting at the end of the month, those 8 hours may be an eternity too late. It’s then that the urgency flag comes into play. The SLA determines a target time against which we want to have resolved the majority (e.g. 90%) of the incidents at the latest. The queue ensures that we start solving the incidents that are closest to the target date. Using the urgency flag we can place an incident at the top of the queue and with that one incident we will be able to start even quicker, without us having to ‘misuse’ the SLA parameters for this, such as impact or service criticality.
As long as this ‘priority = impact x urgency’ algorithm is in the ITIL books, this Zombie idea will continue to plague many a process design and out-of-the-box ITSM tool configuration. If you experience reluctance in your organisation to get rid of this unfortunate algorithm, then quote Steve Jobs: “Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking”. And if that doesn’t help either, then quote Robert Kirkman (author of The Walking Dead): “If it’s dead – fucking KILL IT”.

By Wouter Wyns, Service Management Architect at Xurrent (formerly 4me) | 8 juni 2016

Reasons why you need a Service Catalog

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:26:33 GMT

Before you consider to doing business with an organization, you first need to discover what they have to offer. You would like services and / or products to be organized and described in a way that makes sense to you, the (potential) customer. Law firms organize their offerings by fields of law like business law, family law or criminal law so you immediately know if they could help you registering a patent. A clinic will list the fields of medicine they practice and a car vendor will list the types (and brands) of cars they sell.

Defining Services: Abstraction and Detail
For the sake of this blog, let’s call ‘what the company has to offer’ a service and let’s call ‘the company’ a provider. So a provider offers one or multiple services. These services are described at a level of abstraction that makes sense to the customer (or user) and are combined into a collection that we call the service catalog.

In spite of this abstraction level, details matter. When you want to secure your home you start looking for a ‘home security’ solution. As soon as you find something that might be what you are looking for you will zoom into the details. How many camera’s are included, are these cameras wireless or do they need a cable, where are the recordings stored, how will you get notified of alerts etc. So you first start your search on a higher abstraction level and then zoom into the details. In a restaurant you will browse the menu for a dish (service) that sparkles your interest. Next, you look at the description of the ingredients and the way the dish is cooked. When you want to order something specific, you first mention the dish and then the deviation from what is described in the menu. So you want the Greek salad, but without the olives. The service is the main subject of the conversation between provider and customer.

The IT Disconnect: Ingredients vs. Services
As logical and straightforward as this all may sound, many IT organizations still struggle with this simple concept. They rather advertise and discuss the ingredients of their services (like hardware, applications and connectivity) rather than the service itself. If you work at a school and your responsibility is creating and maintaining the class schedules a service ‘Scheduling’ would probably make a lot of sense to you. When for some reason application ‘Classroom Scheduler 2.0’ is replaced by ‘Schedule Guru 2020’, the name and purpose of the service will not change. The planner does not need to know that the previous application required a dedicated server and a database while the new application is a cloud service.

Solving the Disconnect: A Customer-Centric Approach
So the first step in solving the disconnect between an IT organisation and it’s customers is defining services and hide complexity where it has no added value. Look for a useful segmentation of your users like business function or department and then describe what functionality you actually offer at an abstraction level that makes sense to these people. You might come up with services like finance, payroll, customer relationship management, quality management or scheduling. Combine these with commodity services like workplace, email, network access and document management and you are well on your way.

In a followup article we will further zoom in to the concept of child services and the role of the CMDB in this structure.

How Process Mining Helps Your Organization Excel

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:26:32 GMT

The European Football Championship is just around the corner. These days, more time is spent talking about and analyzing the game and players than the matches themselves. Coaches and team staff also make extensive use of data to improve gameplay and prevent mistakes. For example, by analyzing what led to conceding a goal: perhaps the striker lost possession two minutes earlier, causing defenders to be out of position and unable to do their job effectively.

Process Mining
At OnITnow, we do something similar but with a different purpose. Instead of preventing or scoring goals, we aim to improve Service Management. Increasingly, we use process mining for this purpose. It’s a valuable way to apply specialized algorithms to event log data, enabling us to identify trends, patterns, and process details—and make adjustments or implement measures if necessary.
Process mining, for example, is an essential part of our TOPdesk and Xurrent Healthcheck. This tool quickly and effectively evaluates whether your organization is, as we call it, “service-fit.”
Watch the webinar on optimizing and controlling IT processes: Learn how to use the powerful tool of Process Mining on Xurrent to transform your ITSM processes for greater efficiency, compliance, and improved customer satisfaction.
You can find the slides presented during the webinar [here].

Ping-Ponging Tickets
To achieve this, we extract all data from your Service Management system—automatically and by default. During the Healthcheck, we analyze this data and generate a report that provides insights into your workflow within your Service Management tool and your organization.
Here are a few examples of situations that could make your organization less “service-fit”:
Skipping Steps: You may have ten seemingly logical process steps, but 90% of requests skip directly from step 1 to step 8.
Dead Ends: Are tickets assigned to teams that never actually handle them?
Ping-Ponging: How often are tickets shuffled back and forth within the organization before any real action is taken?

In Control Through Insight
With process mining, you can quickly uncover these issues. Since the original data is already automatically collected, you can identify undesirable patterns and their root causes. This enables targeted interventions, leading to overall process improvement.
Moreover, companies using process mining benefit during audits—both internal and external. Auditors typically request a sample of ten random service requests to verify compliance with documented processes.
If you’ve implemented process mining, you no longer need to produce these 10 samples. Instead, you can show auditors—at the push of a button—what percentage of your processes comply with standards and what percentage do not.
This saves significant time during audits because you don’t need to gather data for the ten samples. It also boosts your credibility by demonstrating: “We are in control because we continuously monitor our processes.”
In this way, process mining is also a valuable tool for proving compliance.

Scoring
By leveraging the vast amount of data available, you can work more effectively on process improvement. We’ve developed several standard models to analyze and answer the most common customer questions upfront.
The key is that with process mining, you’re not just examining the resolution of the service ticket itself—you’re analyzing the entire preceding process.
This reveals patterns, correlations, and root causes, and ultimately paves the way to solutions. Good Service Management is like preventing goals… so you can focus on scoring your own.

By Stephen-Ley

Xurrent Supports Bouwinvest with Service Management Solution

onITnow — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:26:32 GMT

Xurrent Supports Bouwinvest with Service Management Solution

Bouwinvest is an institutional real estate investor that is undergoing significant development. As a result, there is a growing need for control over and insight into IT developments, which also increases the necessity for clear oversight. After an extensive screening process, Bouwinvest chose the service management tool Xurrent last year. Michael de Jong, Manager of IT Services, shares his experiences with Xurrent.

Bouwinvest invests the capital of institutional investors (pension funds, insurers, and charities) in real estate both in the Netherlands and abroad. The number of employees has now grown to over 200, and the Business Technology & Continuous Improvement department supports the entire organization. This includes information management, process optimization, maintenance and development of IT systems, and information security. Michael and his team also serve as the internal support and helpdesk for all Bouwinvest employees.

Until last year, Bouwinvest was not a client of onITnow. How did the business relationship come about?
“We were already using a service management solution. But as our organization grows, collaboration within and between teams becomes more demanding. Our previous application version was somewhat outdated, and we wanted to evolve towards a full-fledged Enterprise Service Management solution. So we explored the market and brought onITnow on board as an advisory partner.”

After a thorough selection process, Bouwinvest had several service management options to choose from. Michael explains:
“Some of them didn’t quite match what we were looking for. Xurrent was the golden mean for us. We aim to streamline operations across departments and move towards our own form of agile-style development. Functionally, Xurrent fit best with that vision.”

Complete Package

The implementation took place between September 2021 and March 2022. Due to Bouwinvest’s ongoing developments, Xurrent can now be used in an increasing number of ways.
“The biggest challenge in the project was achieving a consistent description and setup of processes and services across teams and departments,” says Michael. “We initially expected Xurrent to offer a pre-configured package. That was indeed available, but compromises and customization were also necessary. That said, I find Xurrent to be quite cleverly designed. It offers many practical features, such as an internal chat function for troubleshooting within the platform. With a basic understanding of IT concepts, it’s fairly easy to guide something through a process. When a request comes in, you can immediately assign it to someone who can take action. In terms of look and feel, Xurrent isn’t the slickest product I’ve ever seen. But everything is laid out logically.”