IT service management -- often referred to as ITSM -- is simply how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes all the processes and activities to design, create, deliver, and support IT services.
The core concept of ITSM is the belief that IT should be delivered as a service. A typical ITSM scenario could involve asking for new hardware like a laptop. You would submit your request through a portal, filling out a ticket with all relevant information, and kicking off a repeatable workflow. Then, the ticket would land in the IT team’s queue, where incoming requests are sorted and addressed according to importance.
IT teams leverage a variety of frameworks to guide their work. The most common ones we hear about are ITSM and DevOps, though there are numerous other concepts, like COBIT, SIAM, IT4IT, lean, and the list continues…
So what abbreviations do you need to know? Here we’ll cover two of the most influential frameworks for modern IT teams– ITSM and DevOps– along with a common approach to ITSM. Let’s start by defining some key terms.
As mentioned above, IT Service Management is simply how IT teams manage the delivery of IT services to customers. A team’s approach to ITSM can be structured to align with ITIL practices and influenced by DevOps concepts.
ITSM benefits your IT team, and service management principles can improve your entire organization. ITSM leads to efficiency and productivity gains. A structured approach to service management also brings IT into alignment with business goals, standardizing the delivery of services based on budgets, resources, and results. It reduces costs and risks, and ultimately improves the customer experience.
We’ve found some of the most common benefits of ITSM to include:
Aligning IT teams with business priorities tracked through success metrics
Enabling cross-department collaboration
Bringing IT teams and development teams together through streamlined project management approaches
Empowering IT teams to share knowledge and continuously improve
Improving request coordination for more efficient service
Promoting customer-centricity with self-service and better processes
Responding more quickly to major incidents, and preventing future ones
Service Request Management ':
Service request management is a repeatable procedure for handling the wide variety of customer service requests, like requests for access to applications, software enhancements, and hardware updates. The service request workstream often involves recurring requests, and benefits greatly from enabling customers with knowledge and automating certain tasks.
Knowledge Management :
Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.
IT Asset Management :
IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.
Incident Management :
Incident management is the process to respond to an unplanned event or service interruption and restore the service to its operational state. Considering all the software services organizations rely on today, there are more potential failure points than ever, so this process must be ready to quickly respond to and resolve issues.
Problem Management :
Problem management is the process of identifying and managing the causes of incidents on an IT service. Problem management isn’t just about finding and fixing incidents, but identifying and understanding the underlying causes of an incident as well as identifying the best method to eliminate the root causes.
Change Management :
Change management ensures standard procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to IT infrastructure, whether it’s rolling out new services, managing existing ones, or resolving problems in the code. Effective change management provides context and transparency to avoid bottlenecks, while minimizing risk.
