Provisioning; Automated: Structure Your ITSM to Work for You

ITSM stands for Information Technologies Service Management. ITSM is how IT teams manage delivery of IT services to end users from start to finish. At its core, ITSM is the belief that IT should be delivered as a service instead of the IT department simply managing technology-related issues.

Different from typical IT support, ITSM teams are in charge of distributing and managing any and all types of workplace technology that a company supplies for the end user.  In ITSM, the end users might be employees, customers, or other business partners, and this technology includes everything from physical assets like laptops and workbooks to digital assets like cloud storage or mobile app accounts.

There are many benefits to using an ITSM model on your IT team that can impact your entire company. IT service management can help your IT team successfully align with business goals and reduce IT costs and risks. Some other ITSM benefits include:

• More cross-department collaboration and knowledge sharing thanks to streamlined project management processes
• Quicker response to major incidents and customer requests
• Better processes that lead to more self-service and customer-centric work

ITIL, or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is the guidance framework for implementing and documenting ITSM that is most widely adopted. While ITIL is an exhaustive guide of recommendations, companies can pick and choose from the ITIL recommendations to find the ones that work best for their IT team. ITIL focuses on helping IT teams align with business needs and goals and make sure the correct processes, people, and technology are involved and organized to meet these goals. ITIL v3 includes five parts: strategy, design, transition, operations, and continual service improvement.

Other ITSM frameworks include Business Information Services Library (BiSL), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), Six Sigma, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and ISO/IEC 20000. If you are interested in becoming certified in ITSM, there are multiple certifications that align with these frameworks and would help you implement your chosen framework into your company.

There are 34 generally acknowledged ITSM practices. While we aren’t going to cover all of them in this article, here are a few of the core practices that companies most often put into use:

• ITSM incident management: how a company responds to and recovers from an unplanned service outage or interruption
• ITSM problem management: how to identify and eliminate the factors that cause, or could cause, an incident
• ITSM change management: how to track and manage IT changes to minimize disruption and risks
• ITSM asset and configuration management: how to authorize, monitor, and document the use of a company’s software, hardware, and sensitive information
• ITSM service request management: how to handle requests for new IT services such as new employees needing access to an application or software
• ITSM knowledge management: how the IT team generates and shares knowledge related to IT services across a company and other stakeholders
• ITSM service level management: how to decide on, manage, and track the access levels each end user has, such as which documents different employees need in order to successfully do their jobs

There are a wide variety of software and tools that make it possible to implement and automate ITSM and the processes mentioned above. These software are also sometimes called ITIL tools. Here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a ITSM tool or software for your company:

• Modern IT environments are constantly changing, so the tool you choose should be able to quickly adapt to, identify, fix, and verify rapid changes.
• Find a tool that makes it easier for your IT team to communicate with others in the organization for increased cross-team collaboration.
• Make sure the tool you choose integrates well with the other IT tools your company uses and has the capability to map every ITSM practice you are choosing to implement.
• Find a tool that is easy to implement and has the ability to track the statistics and analytics that are relevant to your company’s goals.
• The tool you choose should automate mundane work so your IT team can eliminate errors and focus on the work that matters most.

When choosing an ITSM software, you will likely need one with ITSM service desk capabilities. Within IT service management, the service desk is the single point of contact for communicating between service providers and the end user. This is where incidents are reported, service and change requests can be made, software is licensed, and third parties are contracted.

If you are interested in implementing IT Service Management in your company, you should first familiarize yourself with the different ITSM processes and consider which of them align with your company’s goals. Once you do this, take some time to decide which ITSM framework works best for your company and chosen process. After choosing an ITSM framework to use, you can find a relevant certification or training program that will teach you how to use that ITSM framework in your company.