IBM announced today it has extended an existing IT services partnership with Lenovo to include blockchain technologies that will provide an immutable record of what services requests were fulfilled when and by whom.
According to IBM’s research, more than $1 trillion is spent on 265 billion customer service calls each year industry-wide, with 50 percent of those calls going unresolved. IBM last year announced it was working with Lenovo to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality technologies to both reduce the number of service tickets that might ever be generated in the first place and then resolve any issues that do warrant a service call faster.
By adding blockchain technologies to that effort the two companies now also plan to reduce the amount of time required to, for example, audit service calls the two companies have made, says Juhi McClelland, general manager of IBM’s Technology Support Services business in North America.
“Companies provide customers with a lot of different services levels,” says McClelland. “Blockchain technologies will make it easier to confirm what services have been completed.”
In addition, McClelland says IBM envisions also apply blockchain technologies to both asset management and eventually the entire IT supply chain.
Thanks to the rise of blockchain databases and other emerging technologies such as machine learning algorithms the way IT services are delivered and consumed is about to profoundly change. The issue that many IT vendors and channel partners alike will have to come to terms with is first determining what level of investment they are willing to make to leverage those technologies and then how to adapt their own support processes. IBM is clearly betting that many IT vendors and channel partners will decide that partnering with IBM to make that transition will make more economic sense.
Regardless of the path chosen, the one thing that is clear is IT services as its historically been known is about to change utterly.
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