Perspectives & Insights

Insights on AI & Intelligent IT Operations

Practical thinking on AI transformation, intelligent IT operations, AI and ITSM, AI resilience and enterprise AI architecture — from 20+ years of running enterprise IT service delivery.

Topic
Intelligent IT Operations

Why AIOps is Not Just Another Buzzword

After two decades in IT operations, I've watched trends come and go. AIOps is different. When implemented correctly — with real telemetry, real workflows, and real ITIL alignment — it doesn't just monitor your infrastructure. It anticipates failure, auto-routes incidents, and learns from every resolution.

Jun 2026 · 8 min readRead Insight
Enterprise AI Architecture

Agentic AI: From Copilots to Autonomous IT Operations

2026 is the year AI stopped suggesting and started doing. Agentic AI systems now plan, execute, and verify multi-step IT operations tasks — but autonomy without guardrails is an outage waiting to happen. Here's where agents genuinely help, and where humans must stay in the loop.

Jul 2026 · 9 min readRead Insight
Enterprise AI Architecture

Digital Twins & Spatial Computing for Enterprise IT

Digital twins have moved beyond manufacturing floors into the data centre and the NOC. Combined with spatial computing interfaces, they're changing how operations teams visualise infrastructure, rehearse changes, and predict failures before they happen.

Jul 2026 · 7 min readRead Insight
AI Resilience & Governance

Quantum-Safe IT: Preparing Enterprise Infrastructure for Post-Quantum Cryptography

Attackers are harvesting your encrypted traffic today to decrypt it when quantum computers mature. With NIST's post-quantum standards finalised and regulatory deadlines approaching, PQC migration has become an IT delivery programme — not a research topic. Here's the practical roadmap.

Jul 2026 · 8 min readRead Insight
AI + ITSM

Prompt Engineering for ITSM Teams

Most service desk teams are sitting on untapped potential. With the right prompt architecture, Claude or ChatGPT can triage tickets, generate incident summaries, draft RCA reports, and coach L1 agents — all without replacing your team.

May 2026 · 6 min readRead Insight
AI + ITSM

n8n + Claude: The ITSM Power Combo

How I built SmartDesk — an AI triage system that auto-classifies 42% of tickets — using n8n workflows and Claude API. A complete walkthrough of the architecture, prompt design, and lessons learned.

Apr 2026 · 10 min readRead Insight
AI Transformation

The AI Adoption Maturity Model for IT

Not all organisations are ready for the same AI interventions. This maturity framework helps CIOs and service delivery leaders identify where they are — and what their next AI investment should be.

Mar 2026 · 7 min readRead Insight
AI + ITSM

ITIL 4 Meets Generative AI

ITIL 4's Service Value System wasn't designed with LLMs in mind — but its flexibility makes it ideal for AI augmentation. A practical guide to overlaying GenAI capabilities on your existing ITIL framework.

Feb 2026 · 5 min readRead Insight
Enterprise AI Architecture

RAG for Knowledge Base Automation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation can turn your ServiceNow knowledge base into an intelligent self-service engine. Here's the architecture I recommend for enterprise ITSM knowledge automation.

Jan 2026 · 9 min readRead Insight
Intelligent IT Operations

Observability vs. Monitoring — Why Your Splunk Dashboard Isn't Enough

Monitoring tells you when something you already anticipated breaks. Observability lets you ask questions you never thought to ask in advance. Most enterprise Splunk deployments are still doing the former.

Dec 2025 · 7 min readRead Insight
Intelligent IT Operations

Building an AIOps Maturity Model: A Practical Framework

Most organizations buy an AIOps platform before they know what maturity stage they're actually at. Here's the four-stage framework I use to diagnose where a team really stands before recommending anything.

Nov 2025 · 8 min readRead Insight
AI + ITSM

Beyond Chatbots: What Production-Grade GenAI for ITSM Actually Looks Like

Most enterprise GenAI-for-ITSM initiatives stall at a chatbot demo. Production-grade implementations look almost nothing like that — and the difference comes down to four specific design decisions.

Oct 2025 · 7 min readRead Insight
AI + ITSM

How I Built Smart Desk: Lessons From Putting Claude Into a Live ServiceNow Workflow

A behind-the-scenes look at building Smart Desk — the architecture decisions, the failure modes I hit early, and why the boring parts of the build mattered more than the AI model choice.

Sep 2025 · 9 min readRead Insight
AI Resilience & Governance

ServiceNow Governance Debt: The Hidden Cost of 'It Just Works'

Most ServiceNow instances accumulate governance debt the same way technical debt builds in codebases — quietly, through years of reasonable-seeming shortcuts, until an audit or an automation project hits the bill all at once.

Aug 2025 · 6 min readRead Insight
AI Resilience & Governance

API Integrations in ServiceNow: A Security-First Checklist

Every API integration you add to ServiceNow expands the platform's attack surface, whether or not anyone treats it that way. Here's the checklist I run before any integration goes live.

Jul 2025 · 6 min readRead Insight
AI Resilience & Governance

ITIL 4 in Practice: Why Most Governance Frameworks Fail at 2am

A governance framework that only works during business hours, with the process owner available to clarify edge cases, isn't a governance framework — it's a documentation exercise waiting for its first real incident.

Jun 2025 · 7 min readRead Insight
AI + ITSM

Change Management Without the Bottleneck: A Practical ITIL 4 Approach

Change management gets a bad reputation because most implementations treat every change like it carries equal risk. ITIL 4's risk-based approach fixes this — if anyone actually implements it that way.

May 2025 · 6 min readRead Insight
Intelligent IT Operations

Running a Global Managed Services Portfolio: Lessons in SLA Governance

SLA governance at portfolio scale is a completely different discipline than SLA management for a single account. Here's what changes once you're responsible for fifteen accounts instead of one.

Apr 2025 · 8 min readRead Insight
Intelligent IT Operations

The Hidden Cost of Bad Service Transitions (and How to Avoid Sev-1s)

Most service transition failures aren't caused by the cutover itself — they're caused by hypercare planning that was treated as an afterthought rather than a core deliverable.

Mar 2025 · 7 min readRead Insight
Next article coming soon

The AI-Native NOC — What IT Operations Looks Like When Agents, Twins, and Humans Share the Console

The AI Operations Brief

One practical idea every week for making enterprise IT operations more intelligent, resilient and autonomous.

Free. No spam.

✓ Subscribed — thank you.