What is IT Service Management (ITSM) or Managing IT to Serve Your Business Needs
The technology is getting to nearly every business, thus companies are looking for ways to integrate IT services into their ‘ever-changing’ business needs.
IT service management (ITSM) is the arts of implementing, handling, and delivering IT services to meet the needs of your organization – would that be a tiny but fast-growing business or a huge corporation with established links and processes.
ITSM system is applied to ensure that the right staff, technology, and processes are in handy to provide real value to the business. So let’s learn how to take hundreds of tasks off your plate with an IT service management approach.
ITSM Definition
To simplify, ITSM is a set of outlined processes, methods, and policies for delivering information technology (IT) products and services. It aims to improve, support, manage, and align the delivery of customer-centric IT services.
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ITSM is a general term that describes a strategic approach to implementation, designing and delivering IT to organizations. It encompasses multiple IT management frameworks applicable to both, centralized and decentralized systems. The main focus of ITSM processes lies in delivering valuable services to customers, rather than departments that manage technology.
Why are the ITSM solutions important?
ITSM solutions are important for a set of reasons:
- Implementing IT service management helps to adjust processes via structured delivery and documentation.
- ITSM implementation brings actionable IT insights that help in decision making.
- And, undoubtedly, the ITSM process assists in reducing costs by building a predictable IT organization.
Simplifying ITSM Process
To manage IT services, companies have to be able to control their capabilities, performance, changes, and consequences when problems occur. All these processes are embraced by the set of categories, originally defined by ITIL, though popping up in different forms in the other ITSM frameworks.
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Let’s get through the main ITSM processes:
Configuration Management focuses on the material and logical aspects of the ITSM;
Change Management includes standardized methods and procedures for managing changes (made in IT management services);
Release Management stresses the testing, release, and verification of changes;
Incident Management is a daily process, aimed to restore normal service with a minimal impact on business;
Availability Management optimizes IT infrastructure services and capabilities;
Capacity Management helps businesses to handle current resources and plan for future resource requirements;
Service Level Management aims to improve and maintain the level of service to organization clients, the other words to meet the Service Level Agreements (SLAs);
Project Management allows maintaining orderly IT services and avoiding issues e.g. outdated systems, etc;
Financial Management focuses on managing the money required by the organization to meet its financial responsibilities;
Knowledge management helps to organize and make available information about IT products and services, saves time on employee training and education programs;
Problem management precedes incident management. As it’s a method to fix problems, facilitate and boost service delivery and performance.
Top 10 Benefits of ITSM Services
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The benefits of ITSM services are vivid and constant in their development. Amongst the most important are:
- Repeatable and extremely scalable processes
- Increased visibility and understanding of IT services
- Improved organization productivity through defined roles and responsibilities
- Quick reaction to change and innovation in the market
- Enhanced information security and risk reduction
- Increased teamwork and collaboration
- Higher quality and productivity
- Better service at a lower cost
- Analytical measurement and performance improvement
- Ability to identify and address repeat problems – reduced incident lifecycles
If your organization consists of more than a few employees, and at least one of your colleagues is entitled as “IT responsible”, your organization is already doing IT service management, hence in a very small way. But as your business grows, you might want to acquire more sophisticated processes to maximize the impact of your ITSM investment.
So why does your business need ITSM system?
ITSM offers a great array of frameworks for businesses to set and develop management standards around information technology services. It embraces software engineering, quality and change management, information security management and a set of vital management framework standards for any org.
It is not so much what IT service management solutions can do, but what you are able to do with the frameworks that live within the ITSM methodology.
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Now you have a clear vision on how to streamline the IT processes in your organization. What’s next? We are happy to consult you on your next steps within IT services. Contact us for a free quote and let’s rock IT together.
