IT Service Management describes the strategic approach to manage, design, deliver and improve ways in which businesses use technology. It assimilates all the processes and activities that support the lifecycle of your services, from inception to conclusion. This includes but isn’t limited to incident and problem management, change and service management, and data and asset management.
A well thought out IT service provides the platform from which businesses can accomplish their goals and provide value to their customers. This can only happen when your organization is completely in sync internally; to design, develop, deploy and support enterprise applications like an exchange server, storage infrastructure, cloud, and networking framework, and finally helpdesk and troubleshooting. One way to achieve total harmony in the execution of IT service management is looking into your organization and providing IT Ops training to the departments that would benefit the most and by extension – benefit your bottom line. With sufficient training, your IT teams would be able to create, manage, deploy, optimize and roll out each service.
In the IT industry, services are generally spoken about in terms of customers and providers who connect through the IT service desk. Some online IT technical training here would go a long way for you as a service provider, allowing your staff to seamlessly select, design, deploy and operate your service. While the service provider can be in-house, it can also be a third-party provider your selected. While a customer is anyone who consumes the products your roll out. Having an IT service catalog can go a long way in helping your customers figure out what they need from a menu or list of services available.
Among its many benefits, the noteworthy ones are the alignment of your IT and business, reliable IT performance, continuous improvement in terms of capabilities and effectiveness, and lower costs. When an organizations IT process in smoothly in sync with one another and well managed across the board, the organization can save valuable time and use it for other strategic initiatives to boost revenue.
Important IT Service Management processes
If the organizational goal is to manage their IT service, they must first control the capabilities of their service, the way it is performing, the changes to be made to it, and the standard operating procedure in the event something goes wrong. All these functions fall under various categories defined by IT infrastructure library, but it also appears in IT service management framework as well. So without further ado here they are:
Change management
When any service of your organization doesn’t meet business expectations, measures need to be taken to alter, modify or otherwise expand to meet said expectations. It is the job of the IT department to determine how these alterations will impact deployment, its implementation, then test whether the changes have the effect intended.
Asset Management
In order for all your services to function, your hardware and software need to be configured and ready to be used. These are referred to as assets and need to be updated, tracked, and mapped to determine how they interact. You can deal with these concerns through, capacity, configuration and asset management and can separated or blended together to achieve different results.
Project Management
Every IT service transitions through various stages and goes through different lifecycles at different speeds and at different times. Through effective project management, an organization’s ability to maintain service continuity greatly improves as well as avoid potential problems.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management has to do with managing data effectively. As knowledge management crosses over into other IT service management processes, it is a very effective way to avoid duplication and making efficiency increasing discovery about your IT services.
Incident Management
IT services are prone to being disrupted by outages or performance issues when such an incident occurs the incident management must deal with this issue immediately and restore the availability of service, codify procedures and make improvements to prevent it from happening again.
Problem management
The purpose of this area is finding the root cause of any problem that arises and fixing it. The organization may be able to remediate the problem but it might lead to future incidents. This is where problem management comes in to permanently fix the issues, and improve performance.
Benefits of Adopting ITSM for your Organization
Adopting IT Service Management practices can tangibly benefit your organization's bottom line. Especially in the Service operation phase. Here are a few advantages your management can enjoy.
Increased Business Efficiency
Applying ITSM principles to your everyday processes and operational tasks can significantly improve your business efficiency across the board. As they quickly enable effective access to your services, this aid your staff to improve the quality of your service as well as increase productivity.
Reduce Redundant Labor and Cost
As an organization grows in size and scope it accumulates a lot of accumulative expenses and often labor. IT service management forces you to go through the structure of your organization with a keen eye. Ultimately finding the financial leaks in your organization and patching them up promptly.
Reduce Downtime
When customers and users pay for a web service, it needs to perform as advertise or it will quickly gain a bad reputation that will haunt your businesses for a long time. IT service management operations phase allows businesses to overhaul their systems to face minimum downtimes.
Improved Security
IT service management principles requires the IT department to configured with tough security measures to protects against external threats, and strictly restrict access to those authorized.
If you want to increase profit and productivity in your organization, IT service management needs to be on point. You’ll only be able to avail benefit as well as your staff is capable. A well-equipped staff is certainly a requisite for IT service management, investing in your staff will certainly be a prudent decision. Providing IT Ops training to enterprise teams really helps them get ahead of any and all IT service-based barriers.