Turning service data into operational intelligence
Service data can tell a lot about how your organization really operates—but only if you know where to look
The American Oncology Network didn’t intend for its Freshservice support platform to turn into a disaster alert system, but that’s what happened.
After Hurricane Helene swept across western North Carolina in September 2024, technicians monitoring AON’s systems received early warnings of the catastrophic damage to come, thanks to Freshservice’s automated notifications.
When five AON clinics in Asheville went dark within minutes of each other, the company knew it had to move fast to restore connectivity and find alternate ways to deliver cancer medication to its patients. The alerts helped the clinics treat patients within a few hours, days before running water was restored, notes VP of IT Operations William Keeney.
While service data is not typically used to track severe weather outages, it can tell a lot about how a company operates, providing opportunities to find friction within the organization, better understand employee issues, and gain an early warning signal about whether an expensive AI initiative is working or not.
“Data that ITSM tools collect to deliver services can have a second life once other departments start pulling from the same platform,” says Stephen Mann, principal analyst for ITSM.tools.
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The question you need to ask is, ‘Why are these tickets appearing at all?’ It’s not usually an IT problem or a business problem, it’s an organizational issue.
Eugen Batmanoff
Founder, Vendorland
A sign of organizational friction
The combination of tickets in an ITSM platform and the silent tracking of assets with ITAM provide clues to broken processes and invisible sources of friction within an organization.
“It provides a window into how an organization actually works,” says Eugen Batmanoff, founder of Vendorland, an IT services directory. “Every support ticket, escalation, approval delay, or recurring request reveals friction in business processes employees have learned to work around.”
The signals that reveal the most are repeated hand-offs between teams, recurring requests after software deployments, or the same employees submitting similar requests over time, adds Batmanoff, who was former head of site reliability engineering for a midsize financial services firm.
“The question you need to ask is, ‘Why are these tickets appearing at all?’ It’s not usually an IT problem or a business problem, it’s an organizational issue,” he says.
According to HappySignals’ 2026 Global IT Experience Benchmark, employees lose more than three hours of productivity every time they open a support ticket. Roughly 1 in 6 report dealing with multiple hand-offs before their problems finally get fixed.
And that doesn’t account for time users spend trying to troubleshoot problems on their own before submitting a ticket, says Jose Prabhu Michael Singarayan, a longtime data scientist and senior member of IEEE. “If you see the same questions being asked a thousand times, you can redesign an interface and put the explanation directly into the application,” he adds. “Users can solve their own problems rather than waiting for someone else to help them.”
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Employee morale early detection system
Analyzing service ticket re-open rates can also uncover HR problems, notes Singarayan. “If the new employees keep re-opening the same tickets, it could be a symptom of a broken onboarding process, training failures, or bad documentation,” he says.
But employees don’t need to submit a ticket to send a message that something isn’t working. Even a sudden spike in private Slack channel conversations after a major company announcement could indicate that employee trust in management is falling, suggests Daniel Space, founder of TheHRBPS, a community for HR business leaders.
Service data can also serve as an early warning system for issues down the road with employee engagement, retention, and recruitment, says Space. “Attrition and engagement scores are lagging indicators,” he says. “By the time they move it’s already too late to do anything. IT service desk and behavioral data can show morale shifting while there’s still time to act.”
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AI transformation barometer
The real test of a new tool isn’t how many employees jump onboard right away and start using it; it’s a few months later, when users start to reach its limits. As companies increase their investments in AI, they’ll want to know whether those efforts are gaining traction—sooner than later. Activity logs and IT tickets can provide those insights.
Even better, a unified platform is what gives an organization that shared context—to resolve tickets faster, understand employees, and even respond to a natural disaster before it becomes a crisis.
