Picture a cook trying to create an award-winning dish with no knowledge of flavor combinations, cooking techniques, or recipes developed over centuries. The result would be mediocre at best. That's the challenge many of us face when adopting AI in service management without leveraging our historical data.
In the recent past, the focus was purely on moving processes online. Data was captured, but the idea of machines learning from this information was a future concept, not a current priority. Fast forward to today, and that same data has become the secret recipe for AI success.
The organisations best positioned to benefit from AI are those that have preserved their historical data and, more importantly, understand how to leverage it. For AI to work optimally, it requires context, patterns, and history to make informed decisions and generate valuable outcomes.
Just as cooks rely on years of culinary knowledge to create exceptional dishes, AI systems need historical data to deliver remarkable results.
The Recipe for Success: Why Historical Data Matters
Just as a chef's skills improve with experience and knowledge of countless recipes, AI grows smarter with access to past data. In service management, historical records such as ticket logs, incident history, change records, and request fulfillment data provide the essential ingredients that help AI understand how your organisation operates.
This context enables AI tools to deliver accurate predictions and intelligent automation. Without this foundation, even the most sophisticated AI system operates blindly, missing the nuanced patterns that drive meaningful insights.
Real-World AI Applications Powered by Historical Data
Your historical data isn't just supporting AI; it’s fuelling advanced solutions:
Predictive Incident Management: AI analyses patterns to forecast potential outages before they occur. By understanding seasonal trends, equipment lifecycles, and failure patterns, your system can alert teams to high-risk scenarios days or weeks in advance.
Intelligent Ticket Routing: Historical resolution data trains AI to automatically assign tickets to the most qualified teams based on past success rates, reducing resolution times and improving first-contact fixes.
Automated Knowledge Discovery: AI mines past tickets to identify recurring issues and automatically generates knowledge base articles, turning yesterday's problems into tomorrow's solutions.
The Hidden Value in "Imperfect" Data
In the past, people thought it best to remove historical records in an effort to streamline systems or free up storage. When organisations begin to realise the power of their legacy data, their mindsets shift.
Here's the reality: even incomplete or inconsistent historical data contains patterns that AI can learn from. That ticket with missing fields? It still shows resolution pathways. Those valuable incident records with different categorisation systems? They reveal how problems evolved over time. Historical data can be remediated to transform unused information into a valuable asset, enabling AI models to identify deeper patterns and generate more accurate, context-driven intelligence.
Cloud storage is cheap, but the insights locked in your historical data are priceless. The question isn't whether you can afford to keep it, it's whether you can afford to lose it.
Don’t Wait For AI - Start Building Your AI Foundation Today
Every AI success story begins and ends with data. Even if not AI-ready yet, we need to start preserving our historical data now.
A good starting point is to ensure no data is deleted going forward. Of course, there may be some legitimate reasons to delete or archive our data, but this should be limited where possible. Rather than deleting valuable records, consider the future-focused approach of migrating and organising them instead - once that data is gone, it’s never coming back.
Precision Bridge’s automated data migration tools make preserving your valuable data effortless and seamless. We ensure your information stays secure, accessible, and perfectly positioned to unlock new opportunities ahead. Precision Bridge has successfully completed over 150 projects, migrating an impressive volume of over 100 terabytes of data. By leveraging our efficient data migration solutions, organisations have saved an incredible 100,000 hours collectively.
