For a sustainable business, an organization must be able to resolve and handle IT issues on a regular basis. The key is to implement a strategic approach that includes delivering, designing, managing, and monitoring the way IT is used within an organization. However, without IT Service Management (ITSM), aligning your overall business objectives with your IT can be challenging. Modern ITSM practices have evolved greatly with time. Instead of performing the traditional IT services, it has now diverted its focus from putting out the fire to preventing it. Therefore, it is essential for an effective systems management plan to facilitate the data center as well as the delivery of IT as a Service (ITaaS).
As far as a hybrid IT environment is concerned, ITSM involves keeping an eye on the day-to-day operations and incorporate third-party services whenever required.
Who's Responsible for Valuable System Management
Generally, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) takes care of the IT system management. However, every person in the department is responsible for the activities, management, and architecting of the management information system. The key is to ensure your IT department has the upgraded IT ops training to effectively oversee information systems, operations, and infrastructures. With the right online IT technical training, the team can perfectly carry out the tasks of gathering system requirements, purchasing and distributing the software and equipment, and configuring it.
Training helps the team to maintain the equipment and software with service and enhancement updates and is more efficient in handling processes, problems, and provisioning services. With the help of the knowledge and skills, they learn with IT ops training, the IT department monitors the system performance to determine whether the objectives are achieved or not.
IT System Management Subsystems
There is a spectrum of management tasks under ITSM ranging from operating systems, infrastructures, and applications. Here are all the subsystems that can instill valuable systems management expertise for any enterprise.
Application Lifecycle Management
The idea revolves around a software application and its supervision process from the start until it retires. The Application Lifecycle Management can be implemented in an organization to track and document changes to a software app, as well as to the application troubleshooting and monitoring, and the overall user experience.
Automation Management
The name says it all. The system enables tracking all the automated system and supervises the control on a daily basis. The idea is to keep maximum control over the regular IT management functions despite their automated programming.
Asset Lifecycle Management
The procurement, planning, usage, deployment, disposition, upgrade, salvage, and decommissioning of software and hardware. The management processes take care of the entire list of IT asset management, which also covers licensing for software from business applications to hypervisors.
Change Management
Trained individuals from the IT department know how to adopt a systematic approach to dealing the changes that occur within the organization and its system. The team is ready to approach the change from different perspectives to implement it according to the suitability and requirement.
Capacity Planning
This management procedure takes care of the estimation of cooling, data center floor space, software, connection infrastructure resources, hardware, and cloud computing resources. Capacity management helps create a margin for the expansions that could take place in the future.
Cloud Lifecycle Management
This is related to the practice of admin control over private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Best Practices of ITSM
In short, ITSM is associated with all the activities involved in creating, designing, supporting, delivering, and managing the lifecycle of the IT services. And it can be an IT service for that matter - including any piece of technology that supports your business processes. These best practices for IT service management can really take the system management expertise to the next level.
Focus on the Clients
The costs and risks of a business are often associated with their customer requirements or client list. When implementing the right ITSM system, it is crucial for the organization assign importance and values to your individual commodities to make a direct connection with the customers.
ITSM Is Not Limited to ITIL
It's natural to incorporate the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in the mechanism when there's a mention of ITSM. And although ITIL is the most prominent and common-used iteration of ITSM, it isn't that valuable if used in isolation. In fact, most businesses incorporate ITIL only with other methodologies and best practices like Application Service Library (ASL), TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), ISO 20000, Six Sigma, CoBit, Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and more. It is best to keep your businesses' personal interest in mind and customize the implementation plan accordingly.
Learn the Framework
While ITSM is responsible for providing the essential tools required for deploying the best practices according to your individual business needs, ITIL ensures that all the vital documentation is brought together for improved management decisions.
Thus, it is important to learn the frameworks. ITSM constitutes the following processes:
IT Service Support
- Problem management
- Incident management
- Change management
- Release management
- Service desk
- Configuration management
IT Service Delivery
- IT Service Continuity
- Availability Management
- Financial Management
- Service-Level Management
- Capacity Management
ITSM Implementation Framework
- Design
- Support
- Assessment
- Planning
- Implementation
Be Careful with The Time
Waiting for the perfect time to implement the right ITSM system can be foolish. In fact, there's no perfect processor time. ITSM requirement can greatly vary from time to time, user to user, and business to business. There's no point in focusing on a one-size-fits-all solution. And if you don't want the system to suffer a negative impact, try and evaluate from the scratch to see what led to losing a client - it could be the absence of process, poor development of the program, or ignorance.
Bottom Line
So, whether you want to reduce the IT cost, improve flexibility, reduce risk, improve governance, or increase the competitive advantage, the right ITSM process is all you need. So train your team accordingly and make sure the processes you implement are in accordance with your business specific needs. Additionally, providing ITIL certification such as Continual Service Improvement, as well as Support and analysis, will help organizations ramp up their IT service management standards.