IT Infrastructure as a ConversationMoving IT Service Management Beyond Tickets With Xurrent
What does it mean when an IT department meets every SLA, closes tickets quickly, and produces healthy reports, but employees across the business are still unhappy with the service they receive? In this episode of IT Infrastructure as a Conversation, I speak with Phil Christianson, Chief Product Officer at Xurrent, about why IT service management needs to move beyond ticket processing and focus more closely on the business outcomes technology teams support. Phil describes infrastructure support as a collaborative activity. When a website, application, or business system fails, restoring service often involves operations, networking, security, developers, application teams, and business owners. A blame-focused culture slows the response because teams begin defending their own areas instead of solving the problem together. He shares an example from a large ecommerce business where one team updated product prices while another sent outdated pricing information to Google for product listing ads. When the prices did not match the retailer’s website, Phil says Google removed the company’s ads for two days. The root cause was not a complex technical failure, but a lack of communication between internal teams. The story also raises questions about how companies measure IT performance. Ticket volumes, SLA breaches, resolution speed, and first-contact resolution provide useful operational data, but they do not fully explain whether employees trust IT or whether a service helps people do their jobs. Phil recalls a CIO joking that a service desk could report excellent KPIs while the whole company disliked working with IT. His point is that metrics need to be considered alongside customer satisfaction, employee experience, and business outcomes. He also questions whether many IT processes still reflect how organizations operate today. A workaround designed for one request a week can become a major burden when demand grows and the person holding the knowledge leaves. Xurrent encourages customers to review processes roughly every eighteen months and ask whether they would make the same decisions today. Reviews can expose outdated request templates, undocumented knowledge, repetitive manual work, and overloaded roles. AI adds another layer. Phil believes employees should receive a useful automated answer quickly, with a clear route to a person when needed. Large language models can locate knowledge, summarize requests, detect duplicates, improve routing, and identify missing information. The risk is that AI can confidently return outdated or incorrect information. IT teams therefore need to review responses, improve
