r/itsm

One thing I think the ITSM industry is underestimating in 2026 is dealing with operational debt. It’s not about broken systems or outages. Mostly about environments that slowly became harder to change.

What’s interesting is that many of these environments are technically “mature” with good governance, strong controls and stable uptime. But operationally, they’re exhausted.

I’ve been seeing more teams shift their conversations from “How do we add more automation?” to “How do we reduce friction without losing control?” That feels like the real 2026 ITSM challenge to me.

Especially now that AI agents are entering service operations faster than most organizations can redesign workflows around them. A lot of failed AI rollouts don’t seem to be AI failures at all. They’re process maturity problems showing up under pressure.

Curious how other teams are handling this right now.

Every single wifi or vpn ticket kicks off with the same back-and-forth where I'm asking are you on vpn, which network are you connected to, are you on mac or windows, and have you rebooted yet. Half the time the answer to question one already solves the whole thing and we both could've saved 20 minutes.

I tried adding a ""before you submit"" checklist directly in the JSM form but people just skip right past it and submit anyway. The conditional fields I set up get completely ignored the moment someone picks General Request as the ticket type. I even wrote up a whole confluence troubleshooting page and nobody can find the thing or bothers searching for it.

How are you guys getting users to run through the obvious stuff before they ping IT, like is there a trick im missing here.

Our HR runs everything through workday and on our side we use okta plus JSM to provision email, slack, jira and github.

Right now we wait til the start date which means new hires sit there doing nothing on day 1 while we scramble to spin up their accounts. Bad first impression and kinda embarrassing when managers are pinging us asking why their new report cant log into anything.

So we tried flipping it and provisioning the moment the offer got accepted. Worked great until one candidate ghosted us and we had a half built account sitting there with access for weeks before anyone noticed.

Not sure which is the lesser evil. Day 1 dead time makes us look slow but ghost accounts feel way riskier from a security angle. How are you guys timing this without ending up with either problem?

Not looking for the textbook answer.

I mean the real process — how many tabs are you jumping between, how long does it usually take, and be honest — have you ever just restarted things and hoped for the best?

Curious what the actual experience looks like for small teams without a dedicated SRE.

Do you do a proper post-mortem or does everyone just move on?

And during the incident itself — how do you handle handover if it drags past shift change? Does the new person have any context or are they starting from scratch?

Curious if anyone in this subreddit has gotten the Lead Auditor or Lead Implementor Certification and if it’s been helpful/useful in your ITSM practice career?