What is ITSM?

Information technologies now encompass and incorporate tasks and responsibilities from across the entire organisation. Managing these services is an ongoing challenge, and customers expect businesses to be up to the task. Businesses depend on ITSM to effectively coordinate these nearly countless tasks and processes, while ensuring that they are providing real value to the customer.

Because IT service management (ITSM) is a collection of policies and processes for the management and support of IT services—throughout their entire lifecycle—ITSM helps improve an enterprise’s efficiency and increase employee productivity.

A major benefit of ITSM is its ability to improve IT efficiency. ITSM does this in the following ways:

• Efficient use of scarce IT resources

The ITSM umbrella encompasses the entire range of IT services, for a more efficient approach.

• Process workflow
  

Automated process workflow improves collaboration and eliminates many manual tasks. ITSM reduces and streamlines many employee tasks, giving them more time to focus on strategy and customers.

• Save time and money

ITSM identifies and eliminates recurring problems and promotes faster issue resolution. This reduces costs, both in terms of time and money investments.

• Reduce downtime

Faster IT response and improved availability management means that your resources will always be working to improve your business.

• Prevent issues before they occur

Create effective, customised responses to specific IT issues.

• Insightful reports

Reporting automation makes the reporting process more cost effective and accurate.

• Service-based incident management

ITSM allows you to identify potential issues and respond to them before they can cause serious problems. Increasing incident visibility and response

• Quickly bounce back from critical IT issues

ITSM provides the strategies and resources to weather even the most difficult IT storms, and then bounce back quickly.

Technology is an integral part of IT processes, but it should not necessarily be the primary focus. ITSM is more encompassing, expanding to include business objectives in addition to traditional IT objectives. As a result, IT service management improves efficiencies across the board. ITSM does this in the following ways:

• Incident management
  Manage and track incidents (a disruption to normal operations), as well as service requests for new services, software or hardware. ITSM incident-management handles the entire incident-management process to restore service to customers as quickly as possible.
  
  The ability to prioritise incidents and service requests according to business impact allows staff to focus their efforts where they can be most effective.

• Problem management
  Streamline incident investigations, from detection to eradication, through the ITIL subprocesses of problem control, error control and proactive problem analysis.
  
  Problem-management processes remove defects from the IT infrastructure, eliminate recurring incidents, and stabilise the environment.

• Change and release management
  ITSM tracks scheduled and planned infrastructure changes, including process management and planning capabilities. Change implementation is quicker and more consistent, with risks and errors minimised.
  
  This application includes a built-in approval process for change and release management. The change module is completely integrated with incident, problem and service-level management applications.

• Service-level management
  Track service-level commitments with customers and from vendors, so management can pinpoint weaknesses and take corrective action.

• Request management
  Manage and follow up on service requests, including requests to reset passwords, install new workstations, update personal data or access information. Request management helps ensure that important requests are always moving forward.

• Configuration management
  Track all configuration items in your IT system. Identify, verify and maintain critical configuration information for hardware, software, personnel and documentation.
  
  Configuration management gives your IT teams a reliable repository for IT component information and establishes clear relationships between IT infrastructure components and services.

• Continual improvement management
  Request improvement opportunities and implement phases and tasks to track performance goals and measure success. Connect improvement to your overall business strategy and improve service efficiency.

• Workflow and talent management
  Place the right people with the right skills and knowledge into the roles that best suit them. Support your business objectives by correctly positioning the most talented employees to provide the best possible service.