IT Service Management is an approach to supporting and designing IT services in use by many organizations. This article attempts to give a short overview of the basic terms to make what can be a large and imposing beast seem slightly more manageable.

What is IT Service Management?

IT Service Management is an approach to designing, managing and delivering IT services to best meet the organization’s needs. ITIL defines the four dimensions that are critical to the facilitation of value for customers:

•  Organizations and people

• Information and technology

• Partners and suppliers

• Value streams and Processes

By considering and balancing the four dimensions an organization can ensure the optimal delivery of services. IT Service Management typically follows frameworks like ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) to standardize and optimize service delivery.

IT Service Management consists of several key practices consisting of processes and functions that organizations use to manage and deliver IT services effectively. 

• Incident Management - An Incident is an outage or a potential outage of a service and the key goal of Incident management is to minimize impact and to restore the service as soon as possible.

• Problem Management - the definition of a Problem is the underlying cause of one or more incidents, and problem management thus seeks to understand what has caused outages, and to find the permanent solution to the outage.

• Change Management - the goal of Change Management is to ensure that all changes to systems are handled in an agreed upon manner, with defined test steps, a back-out plan should the change be unsuccessful, define the risks associated with each new change request and to minimize downtime.

• Service Request Management - To ensure all users’ requests for information, advice, or access to a service, typically through a service desk or portal are handled - including the correct approvals.

• Service Desk - the service desk is the single point of contact (SPOC) for all users to the service provider, handling incidents, service requests, and communication with users. The Service Desk, although a single point of contact might have several different contact channels - Service Portal, email, telephone, chat, or walk up.

• Configuration Management - Information about all the components that is required of an IT service, including how they interact, ensuring that accurate and reliable data is available when needed. The Configuration Management is an important foundation for several of the other key practices - for example by helping identify how a change request impacts other services.

• Service Level Management - Service Level Agreements define the level of service which is to be provided, for example response and resolution times, what penalties can be imposed and so on. Service Level Management monitors and maintains these SLAs.

• Knowledge Management is another foundational component of other practices. Relevant Knowledge can help users help themselves and deflect potential incidents and ensure Service Requests are directed in the correct way. Knowledge Management can also help agents solve incoming incidents and problems by providing check lists, known errors and how-tos.

• IT Asset Management is the practice focused on tracking and managing the financial, contractual, and inventory aspects of IT assets throughout their lifecycle. ITAM and Configuration Management are two different dimensions and perspectives on the assets and services. ITAM is a foundation practice for ensuring financial control, procurement control, and ensuring licensing compliance.

• Continual Improvement - focuses on constantly evaluating and improving IT services and processes to ensure they continue to meet business needs effectively.

Why is IT Service Management Important?

IT Service Management can help organizations achieve several things:

• Improved Efficiency and Productivity - Standardized processes reduce the complexity and inefficiencies in IT operations, leading to more streamlined workflows, quicker response times, and reduced and ideally avoided downtime.

• Enhanced Service Quality: By focusing on consistently delivering high-quality services, which improves user satisfaction and reliability of IT systems.

• Proactive Problem Management: The operational practices - incident and problem management - help organizations to proactively identify and resolve outages and issues and potential outages and issues before they escalate, thereby minimizing disruptions.

• Better Risk Management: ITSM includes a framework for managing changes and mitigating risks, ensuring that any updates or modifications to IT systems are done in a controlled and predictable manner.

• Cost Management: By optimizing resource allocation and reducing waste, ITSM helps in controlling and reducing IT costs while maximizing the return on investment. ITSM also reduces costs incurred by unscheduled outages.

• Regulatory Compliance: ITSM frameworks like ITIL help organizations follow regulatory requirements and industry standards by providing best practices for documentation, process control, and security.

This summer, travelers all over the world experienced what can happen when an update to a system is released without proper testing, as the crowdstrike outage caused flight cancellations all over the world in what has been described as the largest IT outage in history.  The total cost has been calculated to be at least $5 billion for just the Fortune 500 companies. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/24/tech/crowdstrike-outage-cost-cause/index.html 

Closing

Implementing all the different practices of IT Service Management might seem like a huge task, and in many ways it is, however, most organizations will have some version of these practices in place already. And continual improvement is a cornerstone of ITSM. Defining areas of improvement, deciding on how to measure that improvement, and then measuring and adjusting the course of action is something that organizations should be doing continually.

Want to read more? Read this article about combining ITSM and ITOM to work more efficiently.
Read more about key benefits with ServiceNow ITSM