IT Service Management

The goal of ITSM is to ensure that IT services perform in a way that meets the needs of the users and the business. It’s no surprise, then, that a rigorous ITSM approach often results in some significant business benefits:

• ITSM makes it easier for IT teams to provide a fast, agile, trauma-free response to unexpected events, new opportunities and competitive threats.
• By enabling better system performance, greater availability and fewer service interruptions, ITSM helps users do more work and the business do more business.
• By systematically speeding incident resolution, reducing incidents and problems and even automatically preventing or resolving issues, ITSM helps the business get more productivity from IT infrastructure at less cost.
• ITSM helps the organization set and meet realistic expectations for service, leading to greater transparency and improved user satisfaction.
• By embedding compliance into IT service design, delivery and management, ITSM can improve compliance and reduce risk.

For IT departments, ITSM enables a continually more productive, effective and cost-effective service organization that’s aligned with business strategy—an IT department that increasingly becomes a critical part of the organization’s success (and less and less the source of the organization’s problems).

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely adopted best-practices guidance framework for implementing and documenting ITSM. It is an actual library; the latest version, ITIL 4, includes five volumes that cover 34 ITSM practices (up from 26 in ITIL 3). The ITIL framework is described in the volumes listed below:

1. Service Strategy, which focuses on the full ITSM processes lifecycle—designing, developing, implementing and managing a portfolio of IT services, plus determining the cost and budget for these services and forecasting future demand for services.
2. Service Design, which covers designing services and processes with respect to business requirements for availability, security, service level agreements (SLAs) with users, continuity (including backup and disaster recovery services) and much more.
3. Service Transition, which describes best practices for moving to a new or changed service with minimal impact on service quality and performance.
4. Service Operation, which outlines the everyday, nuts-and-bolts management of deployed services, including fulfilling service requests (from users or departments), responding to problems and incidents and controlling access to services.
5. Continual Service Improvement, which covers the steps for revising or expanding services as business needs change.

ITIL is exhaustive, but an organization’s ITSM program does not need to implement it exhaustively—the organization can pick and choose only the ITIL processes and practices they need.

Other best-practice ITSM frameworks exist; some are closely related to ITIL, and many are used in concert with ITIL. These include the following:

• BiSL (Business Information Services Library), which is focused on ITSM from the perspective of users (this is often called the “demand” perspective).
• COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies), which focuses on controls and governance.
• ISO/IEC 20000, the first international standard for service management.
• MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework), an alternative to ITIL.
• Six Sigma, a set of tools for governing IT organizations, manufacturing and other processes, with the goal of achieving statistically high product quality levels.