The Realm of ITSM
IT Service Management (ITSM) is the acronym that is being used by many IT professionals to provide service to business functions. It is the methodology where IT teams can deliver their services to their internal/external stakeholders. It can be internal customers e.g. cybersecurity, Network, Datacenter or external Vendors, or even external clients of the organization.
In short, ITSM is a set of guidelines that provides direction on how to Provide services to stakeholders.
The concept of ITSM came from ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) where it defines the processes and transition from its core phases. Below is a short summarized picture to represent the phases of ITIL.
The above diagram shows a high-level overview of all 3 phases of ITIL. Service Operations, Service Design, and Service transition. The ITIL process has been there for over 15 years and is a standard process for IT Service Management.
Each of these areas has sub-processes. For instance, Service Operations has incident management where dedicated incident management (IM) team tackles various incidents that impact the organization. For example, a payment transaction application went offline of a reputed bank which impacts the business. An incident management (IM) response and resolution team’s action is to identify the root cause of the issue and take short-term and long-term actions to have a resolution. In this scenario, the IM team is mainly responsible to coordinate with various technical teams to identify the issue and coordinate with various IT teams to perform an immediate resolution to bring back the payment transaction application online.
Another example would be when any uncertain event gets triggered within an enterprise environment, an event is generated within certain IT teams e.g. Monitoring, cybersecurity team, etc. Events can be anything from lack of storage space to DDOS cyber attacks in the application layer. In this type of scenario, the monitoring and IM team coordinates with other respective teams to understand the events and decides the actionable items to resolve.
Adopting ITSM is a long-term process for any organization. From a process standpoint, it is efficient in the long run, however, there is a learning curve for all the teams with IT environment. The mindset is to deliver IT services to drive the business.
Today, many organizations are following ITIL or have altered their processes close to ITIL so that they can better serve their customers. Continual Service improvement is another concept that is vital for the entire end-to-end process. Continual Service Improvement is to understand the metrics for their Service delivery procedure and take actions to fine-tune the current process.
ITSM is NOT a tool. It is an industry-standard process where IT teams can serve their customers efficiently. There are many tools that come with a standard ITSM process built-in. We will talk about those in our next article.
Below are some of the companies that follow ITSM processes
