IT service management -- often referred to as ITSM -- is simply how 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.
ITSM benefits your IT team, and service management principles can improve your entire organization. ITSM leads to efficiency and productivity gains. Our 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.
Our Experience includes implementation of ITSM products by achieving some of the most common benefits:
What are ITSM processes? ITIL version 4 recently shifted from recommending ITSM “processes” to introduce 34 ITSM “practices.” Their reasoning for this updated terminology is so that “elements such as culture, technology, information and data management can be considered to get a holistic vision of the ways of working.” This more comprehensive approach better reflects the realities of modern organizations.
What is important, and true regardless of what framework your team follows, is that modern IT service teams use organizational resources and follow repeatable procedures to deliver consistent, efficient service. In fact, leveraging practice or process is what distinguishes ITSM from IT.
Our Team starts from the core ITSM processes that includes the following areas and we learn along the way and adapt as our client evolves.
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 work stream often involves recurring requests, and benefits greatly from enabling customers with knowledge and automating certain tasks.
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 (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 is making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.
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 is the process of identifying and managing the causes of incidents on an IT service. Problem management is not 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 ensures standard procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to IT infrastructure, whether it is 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.