There are a number of ITSM definitions. For example, ITIL is a worldwide famous set of best IT service management practices – defines ITSM as following:
“Implementation and management of quality IT-services, which correspond to the business needs”
For understanding, it might be better to think of ITSM as “business efficiency increase due to more effective IT services delivery”
IT as a service
A lot of people mechanically think of the processes – incidents and changes management – when ITSM is mentioned, however, ITSM “thinking” is really a very important part of projecting and providing superb IT service and support. In its basis there is IT as a service.
It means that instead of thinking about providing and managing IT services in categories of individual network domains, computing resources and storage, ITSM provides IT-services delivery. For instance, e-mail or managed desktop service. These IT-services are those that workers or costumers work with and use (and are aware of the fact, that these services do).
It’s important not to get bogged down in the processes and remember that ITSM is about making your company IT and business-operations better. The final goal of ITSM is to increase the business effectiveness.
ITSM possibilities
ITSM includes a host of processes – in ITIL there are 26 of them and 4 “functions”, but it’s better to think of them as of possibilities. They let IT-departments or service providers develop, create, provide, support and manage IT services.
The most common of them are:
Incident management that is requesting help for solving IT problems, usually through the technical or customer support.
Request management, that’s requests processing and providing new IT services with the help of an IT service or support service
Change management, which is an effective change management in IT and business.
If you are interested in a full list of 23 ITSM processes / possibilities, then here they are (enumerated in ITIL book)
Service strategy:
- IT service strategy management
- Portfolio management
- Demand management
- IT service finance management
- Business relationship management
Service design:
- Design coordination
- Service level management
- Service catalog management
- Accessibility management
- Capacity management
- Provider management
- IT-service continuity management
- Information security management
Service transformation:
- Transformation planning and supporting
- Change evaluation
- Change management
- Release and deployment management
- Service confirmation and testing
- Asset and configuration management
- Knowledge management
Service Operation:
- Event Management
- Incident Management
- Service request management
- Problem management [including root cause analysis]
- Access control
- Continuous service improvement:
- Continuous service improvement (CSI) {Ed. In fact, the official name of the process: “The seven-step process of improvement”}
Why ITSM is important?
ITSM can help you, your IT team and your company in general, i.e. its adaptation and use bring both IT and business profits.
When you start “implementing” ITSM or, more realistically, building on what you already have, it is useful to formulate the business case of adopting ITSM, but not just treat it as “something that would be not bad to have at home”.
It is important to underline that it is better not to be an ” ITSM business case” but a business case which aim is to improve something with ITSM as a means, rather than an independent goal … “For example, your company may want to use ITSM and ITIL for:
- Operating IT costs reduce
- The service quality improve
- Customer satisfaction increase (for both internal and external)
- Management or risks reduce improve
- Increasing of competitive advantages by improving IT support
- Providing greater flexibility or increasing the speed / speed of new IT services delivery or
- Something like that.
In addition, of course the company may want to make a profit at once with the aid of the several mentioned examples
Pros of ITSM
Improvement of the service quality thanks to ITSM, includes:
Fewer incidents which are easier manageable – provision of higher IT and business-service accessibility
Increased business productivity – thanks to higher IT-service accessibility and fast recovery of service for end-user’s IT tasks
Improved customer perception – for both IT services and IT support.
Reduction of long-term spending on IT-provision, management and support (thanks to ITSM) includes:
Increase in efficiency – due to the consistent application of best practices for ITSM-processes and suitable for the ITSM technologies use
IT losses reduction – thanks to better IT assets and services understanding and management
Reinvestment of IT savings – to provide new or improved IT services that ultimately improve business activity and results.
Risks reduce and management improve through ITSM includes:
Compliance maintenance – both internal and external requirements for risk management, through formal and built-in internal controls, as well as the ability to rely on them and demonstrate their consistent application.
Of course, there are many other advantages of ITSM and ITIL, both for IT and for business in general, but I hope this is enough to satisfy your appetite.
Digging deeper in search of potential benefits from ITSM
In these financial-conscious times, it’s worth taking a deeper look at how ITSM can save your IT team, as well as business and money.
Firstly, there is “increased IT efficiency,” where ITSM principles and technologies, suitable for ITSM, can:
Provide the technological process and automation – elimination of labor-intensive manual processes and improvement of interaction and work between different people or teams.
Lead to a more focused use of the missing resources of IT professionals. Less administration, waiting and even “fires extinguishing” (incidents) – freeing resources for strategic tasks.
Maintain “service-based incident management” – allows IT support staff to understand which IT failures have the greatest impact on the business and, as a result, prioritize (rather than solve tasks based simply on the order of the incidents occurrence)
Save time and money by managing knowledge-in particular, reusing knowledge gained in the resolution of incidents, instead of “inventing a bicycle”, to reduce the time of solving incidents and thus affect end users or the business in general.
Make reporting easier and increase the value of service and operating information – the transition from manual to system reports with additional benefits that will manifest themselves over time.
In addition, there is “increased business efficiency”, where the principles of ITSM and the corresponding ITSM technologies can help:
Downtime reduce – using best practices for managing incidents, problems and accessibility
Prevent serious, business-related problems before they occur – by means of problem management and effectiveness management
Companies recover quickly after critical business disruptions – with best practice of significant incidents management and management of the IT services continuity.
Finally, there is a “loss reduction”, where the principles of ITSM and related to it technologies can:
Help reduce, if not completely eliminate, duplication of efforts and recycling – time, labor and, consequently, unnecessary spending saving. In particular, due to the specification of roles and responsibilities and the use of consistent processes on the basis of the best practices.
Give confidence that all new IT spending are necessary – thanks to the best practices in asset, configurations and capacities management.
Prevent losses connected with changes or inconsistencies – avoiding the spending on “redeployment”, which ultimately entail doubling or even tripling of the efforts.
Get rid of the spending of duplicates or obsolete applications, hardware, hosting, cloud services and their support – thanks to the best asset management practices
Potential “quick wins” with ITSM
Rome was not built in one day – and the ITSM deployment can take time. Probably, much time. Therefore, it is worthwhile to understand not only what can be done to improve the situation, but also what needs to be done, first of all, to gain the so-called “quick wins”. This is an understanding of the business pain points, and maximum benefits achievement, as soon as possible.
Starting with “resource optimization”, there are a number of simple ways to start eliminating IT losses:
Buy only what you really need, using the best practices of capacity management.
Reuse, rather than buying more hardware or software using asset and configuration management, especially for software licenses. Your IT department can become an ocean of redundant software.
Reduce of unsuccessful changes with improved change management – have you ever thought how much it cost to your business to have unsuccessful changes? Even if this is simply a negative impact of incidents connected with the change.
Find duplicate, underused or even unused applications or IT services, due to asset and portfolio management. If your business has gone through a significant merger and absorption transaction, you will most likely pay “twice for everything”.
We make “labor-saving changes”:
- Automate as much as possible – especially repetitive, low-intelligent tasks
- Offer employees self-service capabilities, supported by automation, so that end-users can service / help themselves
- Use the remote solution tools – the shorter the travel time, the better, plus we provide a faster solution, which is likely to improve the service quality
- Deploy, at least partially, the problems management – we reduce the workload of the support service to resolve recurring incidents.
Finally, we initiate a “constant dialogue with business” – it can save you money and increase the perception of the corporate IT value:
Improve your understanding of future business needs for a better understanding of IT needs and the impact on IT strategy and purchase solutions. This can be helped by Demand management, Capacity management, Service level management and Business relationship management,
Actively tell about the successes in IT successes – sadly, the IT successes do not sell themselves, unlike failures
Discuss how SLAs of service levels correlate with expenses connected with different levels of service. For example, a slight decrease in service level targets can significantly reduce IT and business spending with minimal impact on the service perception level.
This article is just a shallow introduction to what ITSM is, but I hope it gave you an opportunity to evaluate what it is and how it can help.
About The Author
Виктор Карабедянц