What Is IT Service Management (ITSM)?
ITSM refers to the strategy that underlies an organization’s delivery of IT services to end users. Technologies, processes, and people are all important parts of ITSM.
ITSM focuses on understanding and meeting end user needs. This ranges from designing IT systems with effective demand management to deploying processes, hardware, and software that improve services. ITSM activities make it possible to grow and develop IT systems to accommodate evolving expectations and technologies.
In the past, many enterprise IT departments evolved into a collection of separate teams and functions, where the help desk might operate independently from the infrastructure maintenance team, for example. In an ITSM-based environment, however, IT teams coordinate their efforts, harnessing automation and other advanced tools to efficiently deliver a comprehensive set of IT services to end users.
The Role of ITIL in ITSM
Many organizations adopt one or more ITSM frameworks to ensure IT services are aligned with business goals.
ITIL, or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a popular best practices framework for ITSM. ITIL emphasizes a collaborative approach that breaks free from silos to maintain an agile, flexible IT organization.
An ITIL framework begins with strategic planning and stakeholder engagement to support user-centric system design. The IT team then builds or buys the system components and delivers the solution. Once available to end users, IT provides ongoing support, system maintenance, and improvements to ensure effective solution use.
Using the ITIL framework can help organizations better understand the strengths and weaknesses of current IT strategies and build a stronger foundation for the future.
Benefits of ITSM
When organizations use ITSM effectively, they can provide responsive services with high availability at a low cost. ITSM can boost employee productivity, enhance customer experience, and simplify the analysis and improvement of services over time.
ITSM helps organizations:
- Streamline IT service delivery: ITSM is a strategic approach designed to unify and streamline the delivery of services that were previously kept separate due to siloed teams or incompatible technologies.
- Reduce downtime: ITSM encompasses device and fleet management systems that support enhanced security and responsiveness, leading to fewer outages and quicker recovery.
- Increase agility: An ITSM framework is coordinated, and activities and results are monitored systematically. This comprehensive approach supports continuous improvement and fosters increased agility, enabling an enterprise to respond quickly to new technologies and trends.
Challenges of ITSM
ITSM planning and design are complex processes, and implementing any new, far-reaching policies can face various challenges. While some difficulties may be resolved with the help of technology, other problems are human centered. These challenges can be addressed by intentionally repositioning and retraining key personnel and teams.
Demonstrating ROI for ITSM
ITSM tools and systems can be expensive and often require significant implementation time and effort. That’s why ITSM planning often begins with the challenge of justifying the investment to senior leadership. This is a complicated issue, as so much of the future effort, cost, and impact of ITSM are unpredictable.
Selection and integration of new ITSM tools and systems can also pose problems, as they may be purchased from different sources and are not always designed to work together.
Siloed Teams and Change-Resistant Users
Silos within the IT organization can impede progress toward a unified service management policy. For example, if the help desk staff is unaccustomed to working closely with the change management team, they may duplicate efforts and delay or even derail ITSM implementation.
Users can be resistant to change that disrupts their work routines. Delay in user adoption can slow or stall the rollout of new management practices. For example, ITSM designs often automate common processes that may have been managed manually, such as help-ticket handling and password resets. The lack of a clear, widely accepted process for incident reporting can also compound user frustrations.
ITSM-Enabled Services and Solutions
ITSM supports various services and solutions for efficiently managing and supporting systems, devices, and users in on-premises and remote environments.
Incident Management
Standardized processes help IT identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues to minimize downtime. Toolsets, such as those for remote device management, help IT departments resolve issues more quickly without the need for costly on-site visits.
Problem Management
Remote monitoring and management tools help IT teams proactively maintain systems and devices to improve reliability and reduce incidents. The use of integrated AI-enabled system capabilities, such as AI used for cybersecurity, can also help proactively identify and address problems before they impact systems and users.
When problems arise, IT departments and help desks rely on tools that support full remote diagnosis and configuration to resolve issues for on-site and remote employees.
Change Management
Change management processes help to reduce risk and disruption when system-wide updates are needed. For example, an effective patch management process helps IT teams keep systems updated, reduce potential attack surfaces, and maintain operational stability. Automated and remote management tools help IT implement global changes more efficiently and consistently, simplifying organizational change management and providing additional compliance benefits.
Deployment Management
Deployment management processes help to minimize downtime and service disruption by effectively planning, scheduling, and controlling the rollout of new and updated services. Stakeholder communication is also a key part of this process. Tools and hardware-based manageability capabilities, such as those that enable IT to deploy and configure new software and services remotely during off-hours—even to devices that are asleep or powered off—help maximize uptime.
IT Service Continuity Management
Ensuring service resilience is a critical aspect of IT management. In some cases, enterprises may rely on cloud-based options to maintain access to data and enable faster recovery during system-wide outages. IT can also proactively address resiliency needs by selecting end user devices built on a stable, validated platform, particularly those that ensure no hardware changes over a period of time. This helps reduce the number of hardware images IT needs to maintain across the fleet and translates to fewer interruptions and easier device continuity management for IT.
Information Security Management
Protecting people, data, and systems from sophisticated cyber threats is an increasing challenge for IT organizations that requires a multilayered approach. To protect the overall enterprise IT infrastructure, IT teams may take on modernization projects to introduce advanced security measures within a data center or at the edge. These efforts can also help automate provisioning and configuration processes and improve system performance, reliability, and stability, helping to improve service delivery and IT efficiency.
Endpoint devices, including end user and edge devices, are the largest source of successful cyberattacks that now target below the operating system (OS) to gain access to the whole system stack. To address this challenge, IT teams can strengthen their fleets with end user devices that have AI-enabled and hardware-based security capabilities. These devices provide integrated, proactive protections; monitoring, detection, and response capabilities; and often IT tools to easily deploy security patches and recover from attacks, should they occur.
The Future of ITSM
ITSM activities make it possible to grow and develop IT systems to accommodate evolving expectations and technologies.
An agile, flexible approach to ITSM can help support increased adoption of AI, IoT, cloud, edge computing and other new and emerging technologies. At the same time, those advanced capabilities can contribute to ITSM processes, making the IT infrastructure more adaptable and scalable.