What is ITSM ?

What is ITSM? This is, by far, the hardest question to answer to anyone outside ITSM. I have often found people that work in tech, namely programmers or sys-admins and even technical team leaders who had no idea what the management of IT services actually means and why it’s good to have some of that voodoo around.

My goal is not to keep defining ITSM or various processes used in the delivery of IT services, but to make this kind of information accessible to anyone, regardless of the industry they are involved in. There is a ton of material on ITSM online, some of it good, some outdated, some reinterpreted by various authors to suit whatever goals of sales they may have. I want to bite-size ITSM.

The ITSM acronym stands for Information Technology Service Management.

ITSM is a means to an end, an enabler of business strategy, a formalized way for IT to deliver benefits to it’s customer. Here is how it happens:

1. Any business aims to make profit, as this is it’s reason of existence. To achieve profit, the stakeholders define a set of long-term objectives.
2. The company’s management must then make a set of decisions that form the business strategy for achieving those objectives.
3. The strategy is passed on to IT management, who defines the services that must be delivered to the business, along with a set of guidelines for delivering those services. This is known as IT governance.
4. The services defined by IT governance are broken down into processes by ITSM. ITSM is responsible for the running of those processes and the delivery of services to the business.

Let’s have a short example to make it more digestible. I like pizza, so let’s consider a pizza delivery restaurant called Pizza&Pizza, which is about to open 50 delivery points. The translation from business objectives to IT processes might go something like this:

1. To make profit, Pizza&Pizza must be able to make, sell and deliver pizza. Their objective is to differentiate themselves from rival companies by making their menu open to customization by the customer and allowing payment by card.
2. Pizza&Pizza management decide that they will take orders via an website and via phone (with an employee also using the website instead of the customer). Payment by card will be available upon delivery and via the website after the order is placed.
3. As all the telephony needs of the company are outsourced to a telecom company, IT management decides that there are only two services that need to be delivered by IT: the website and the payment system.
4. ITSM breaks down the website into development and support processes. The payment system will be purchased from a specialized company and will be customized for the particular needs of Pizza&Pizza. Administration, hardware support and software support are the specialized processes that need to be setup by IT. Besides these, ITSM considers adding Incident Management, Problem Management and Change Management as supporting processes for the delivery of IT services. The IT department of Pizza&Pizza will be organized based on the processes defined by ITSM.

An IT organization, be it small (5 to 10 people) or large (thousands of employees) delivers services to their sponsor, a business entity of some sort.

ITSM is a framework that translates business goals into the processes needed by an IT organization in order to deliver services to their customer.

ITSM can be organized in various ways, depending on organization size and needs. There are a number of frameworks and best practices for ITSM, but there is no universal recipe for this sophisticated dish. The best known and widely used of these is ITIL. I have been working with ITIL in operations between 2008 and 2012 and dealing with transition ITSM processes since then. I will frequently link ITSM and ITIL in my posts, but I promise it will all make sense.

Because an image is worth a thousand words (or 657 in this particular case), I also sketched a flowchart to summarize what ITSM represents.

An informal chart showing the role of ITSM