IT service management (ITSM) is a general term that describes a strategic approach to designing, delivering, managing and improving the way businesses implement IT services. ITSM includes all the discrete activities and processes that support an IT service throughout its lifecycle, from product and service development to ongoing service and change management to problem, incident, asset and knowledge management.
IT services include the deployment and support of enterprise applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, for customer relationship management or the architecting and optimization of storage, networks and cloud resources. They also cover the creation and management of processes such as help desk support and troubleshooting procedures.
ITSM helps IT teams create service-level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs), which codify performance and availability expectations for each IT product or service and the ramifications if the service falls below these expectations.
ITSM benefits include improved business-IT alignment, more predictable IT performance and costs, and continual improvement of IT effectiveness, capabilities and responsiveness to the business. When IT processes are orderly and well managed, organizations can spend less time on proverbial firefighting and devote it to strategic initiatives.
Why is ITSM important?
ITSM does many important things for businesses and IT, including the following three tasks:
- It aligns IT work with business goals so that maximum business value can be derived from IT investments.
- It offers a conceptual framework for how IT work is to be done for best results.
- It helps IT adopt a service culture for internal users and external customers.
An IT service management approach focuses on positive results for the business and is essential for the effective integration of IT and business processes. When the business and IT achieve an optimal alignment of IT work with business goals and employ SLA and KPI metrics to check progress and results, the outcomes for both IT and the business substantially improve.
By following an ITSM service framework and employing ITSM tools, IT staff can respond to technical issues with greater efficiency and speed to resolution. Prior to ITSM, IT organizations devoted a significant amount of time to putting out fires because of a lack of a service strategy for their IT. ITSM methods and tools, which focus on teamwork and service, change that dynamic.
ITSM and IT service delivery
IT service delivery is generally discussed in terms of providers and customers who interact using the IT service desk. An IT service provider selects, designs, deploys and operates the service. The provider can be an internal IT department or a third-party specialist. An IT service customer is any consumer of those services, such as the employee who accesses email through the organization's Microsoft Outlook interface as part of Microsoft 365. IT organizations generally offer customers an IT service catalog, a list or menu of available services.
There are many roles within the IT service desk. IT services typically start with a need and strategy, which demands clear guidance from business and IT leaders. Services must then be architected and deployed, requiring the expertise of IT hardware and software application engineers. Services must be monitored and tracked and problems remediated by IT administrators and help desk staff. KPIs for the service must be communicated along with recommendations for service changes and improvements to the business that uses them.
The terms ITSM and IT service delivery are sometimes used interchangeably. However, ITSM emphasizes IT service operations and improvement, while IT service delivery focuses on the quality of the work and meeting customer expectations. Additionally, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and ITSM are typically conflated, but ITIL is not ITSM. While ITIL is a well-known strategic approach to IT that espouses best practices for IT lifecycle management on a high level, the ITSM framework executes these best practices and strategies.
ITSM processes
To manage IT services once they are deployed, organizations must control each service's capabilities, how the service performs, changes to the service and what happens when the service experiences problems. These key processes fall under the following main categories:
- Change management. When a service is out of step with business expectations, it must be modified, expanded or otherwise altered. IT must determine how these changes affect the service deployment, implement them appropriately and monitor if they have the intended effect. Software release management can be grouped with change management or treated as a separate process.
- Asset management. Services require software and hardware assets to function. These assets should be tracked, updated appropriately and mapped to show how they interact. Configuration management, capacity management and asset management deal with these concerns and can be blended or separate processes.
- Project management. IT services transition between various stages of their lifecycles at different times and speeds. Project management skills enable IT organizations to maintain orderly services and avoid problems, such as outdated systems or shadow IT.
- Knowledge management. Knowledge management intersects with the other ITSM processes and helps avoid duplicate work and discovery by organizing and making information available about IT services.
- Incident management. When performance issues or outages disrupt an IT service, the IT service desk must address the issue, restore service availability, make improvements and codify procedures to prevent reoccurrence. Incident management helps solve these problems.
- Problem management. A problem is the root cause of an incident. An IT organization might remediate an incident but not fix the problem, leading to future incidents. Problem management is a way to fix issues permanently to improve service delivery and performance.
How ITSM is used across industries
ITSM is used in the following industries:
- Oil and gas. This industry is highly distributed over many geographical areas and employs thousands of employees and contractors. ITSM tools and practices help oil and gas companies define and administer the various security access permissions issued for users based on their roles. ITSM also provides tools and methods for monitoring and securing IT assets, such as drilling rigs and equipment deployed in the field.
- Logistics. ITSM methods and tools assist in monitoring complex transportation processes that involve multiple shippers and suppliers, beginning with item packing and shipping and ending with the delivery of goods to a destination. The processes being tracked and monitored involve a diversity of data that comes in from multimodal shippers and follows the flow of goods.
- Healthcare. ITSM tools automate billing, scheduling and patient record management to reduce operational costs. They also assist in inventory management to ensure that medical supplies are available without being overprovisioned. ITSM helps with the 24/7 monitoring of mission-critical systems for hospitals and clinics to ensure that systems are always up and running.
- Aerospace. Engineering revisions and part changes are continuous and must be tracked by multiple part number systems. ITSM provides tools and best practices for change management, task automation and maintenance of a change history for every configuration and part. Risk management tools provide risk assessments for every engineering configuration and part change, ensuring compliance with aerospace and defense regulations and cross-communicating to teams so that everyone is aware of changes, change control and compliance. ITSM monitors all activities and events on networks and enacts maximum security policies and protections from cybersecurity threats.
- Education. ITSM manages and maintains security and system uptime so that education in schools is uninterrupted. ITSM methods also assist education IT staff with the best ways to perform network problem identification and resolution. In colleges and universities, where professors, researchers, teaching assistants and students move between multiple departments and campuses, ITSM provides tools for tracking user permissions, credentials and activities across all these entities for security purposes. It also provides a change management methodology and tools for data safekeeping and security in student information systems.
- Financial services. ITSM provides ways to reduce the cost of operations through automation, vetting processes and operations for compliance with industry regulations. ITSM tools track and monitor network security from within and outside of financial institutions and their many edge points, such as automated teller machines and customer smartphones. Banks and credit unions use ITSM tools and methods to assist with the automation of customer-facing web portals and self-service options.
- Government. ITSM models and automates routine processes so that operations run cleaner and leaner. Since most government agencies have their own work processes, ITSM tools and methods can be customized for the workflows of each individual department, providing pathways for integrating data from diverse system silos.
ITSM software and tools
ITSM software manages the workflow of service delivery and can enable communication between customers and providers. This category includes process orchestration, help desk and service desk tools.
The following are examples of ITSM tools:
- Atlassian Jira Service Management.
- BMC Helix ITSM.
- EasyVista EV Service Manager.
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.
- ServiceNow IT Service Management.
- SolarWinds Service Desk.
- SysAid.
- TeamDynamix ITSM.
- Topdesk.
- Zendesk Suite.
Other systems management tools aid ITSM processes. These tool categories include configuration management database, asset management, license management, application performance monitoring and log analytics software.
Most ITSM software offers the following key features:
- Customizable reporting and analytics.
- Service catalogs.
- Self-service portals.
- Asset management.
- Incident management.
- Automation capabilities.
- Change management.
- Content and knowledge bases.
Popular ITSM frameworks
ITSM is typically associated with the service lifecycle processes outlined in ITIL v3. These include setting a strategy, creating a design, managing change, handling service operations and management, and continually improving services. ITSM puts these ITIL principles into practice by providing the following frameworks:
- COBIT. COBIT, which stands for Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies, is a framework created by ISACA for developing, implementing, monitoring and improving IT governance and management practices.
- Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). This series of documents guides IT professionals through the processes of creating, implementing and managing efficient and cost-effective services. Like ITIL, MOF includes guidelines for the entire lifecycle of an IT service, from concept to retirement or replacement.
- ISO 20000. This international IT service management standard ensures that a company's ITSM processes are aligned with the business's needs and international best practices. Although the British Standards Institution developed the standard to mirror best practices described within the ITIL framework, it also supports other frameworks, such as MOF.
- Six Sigma. Motorola introduced the Six Sigma management framework, which is applied to various company disciplines, including IT. The framework emphasizes setting extremely high objectives, collecting data and analyzing results to a fine degree to reduce defects in products and services.
- FitSM. This scaled-down ITSM offering works well for companies that do not need a fully developed ITSM framework. It streamlines the delivery of IT products, services and management, with the goal of doing it in as few steps as possible.
- Business Process Framework (eTOM). Developed by the TM Forum, eTOM provides telecom service providers with a structured way to define and share business processes with their suppliers.
- The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). This framework targets the alignment of the business with IT during the data, business, technical and application architecture design phases of a new software system or application. The Open Group, a global consortium for industry standards, created and maintains TOGAF.
ITIL vs. ITSM vs. DevOps
The terms ITIL, ITSM and DevOps are often used interchangeably. They are blended into an overall IT strategy that ensures the optimum delivery of both services and products. However, this can also blur the lines between these three different IT concepts. The following is a breakdown of each.
ITIL
ITIL is a conceptual framework for running IT so it stays aligned with the needs of the business. ITIL was created because there was a need for ITSM best practices in the late 1980s, and it has since become the de facto framework used by many organizations across the world. The latest version of the framework is ITIL 4 released in 2019.
ITIL contains a series of policy and practice statements for IT and business alignment and consists of the following seven major guidelines:
- Focus on value.
- Start where you are.
- Progress iteratively with feedback.
- Collaborate and promote visibility.
- Think and work holistically.
- Keep it simple and practical.
- Optimize and automate.
ITSM
ITSM is the operational execution of ITIL principles. This execution begins by defining business requirements for IT and proceeds into application development and deployment; service functions, such as network and system availability and performance; security and data safekeeping; and IT help desk support and responsiveness. Companies define the business expectations for IT in a set of KPIs or SLAs that measure product and service effectiveness.
DevOps
DevOps is a collaborative application development discipline within ITSM that is also closely linked to the ITIL principles of focusing on value, starting where you are, processing iteratively -- a hallmark of DevOps development -- thinking holistically, collaborating, providing visibility of work to both IT and users, keeping work simple and automating where possible. The keys to DevOps are total visibility and active IT and user collaboration in application development. The goal is to maintain close alignment between IT work and the end business.
While AI has the potential to transform ITSM, organizations face several potential challenges when implementing these technologies.