General Concept

IT service management (ITSM) is simply how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes all the processes and activities to design, create, deliver, and support IT services.

The core concept of ITSM is the belief that IT should be delivered as a service. A typical ITSM scenario could involve asking for new hardware like a laptop. A request would be submitted through a portal, filling out a ticket with all relevant information, and kicking off a repeatable workflow. Then, the ticket would land in the IT team’s queue, where incoming requests are sorted and addressed according to importance.

Due to their day-to-day interactions with IT, people often misconstrue ITSM as basic IT support. On the contrary, ITSM teams oversee all kinds of workplace technology, ranging from laptops, to servers, to business-critical software applications.

There is a common line of thinking in the IT industry that posits that a proper approach to ITSM should follow three steps in this order:

1) Build and implement IT technology.

2) Bring in and enforce the right process.

3) People can learn the technology and abide by the process.

The team comes first. IT teams should be continually learning and improving. They must feel valued and empowered to make a difference in the organization. Rather than answering to rules imposed by a tiered reporting structure or rigid process, IT teams can make informed decisions about things like adopting SLAs and which software to implement. Because IT teams enable productivity and digital transformation, strong IT teams are critical to strong organizations. The team is at the center of ITSM processes (practices) and technologies.

After focusing on the strength of the IT team, it’s possible to develop the unique Practices (and capabilities) to provide value to the organization. No matter how respectable the source, it’s insufficient to simply “copy and paste” another organization’s set of standards and hope they will work in their own unique environments. Successful IT teams build their approach from frameworks like ITIL (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library), but are careful to think about how to adapt processes that will resonate with their customers.

Finally, software and Technology should support a team’s practices and amplify their impact. Good ITSM software helps IT reach others in their organizations with cross-team collaboration. It empowers end-users and automates mundane work, so everyone gets more time to focus on what matters most to them. We’ve all seen technology get in the way and create unnecessary complexity or frustration. When technology works well it feels like magic, but in reality, it’s a reflection of the hard work of the teams that use it.

Purpose of ITSM

ITSM benefits IT teams, and service management principles can improve the entire organization. ITSM leads to efficiency and productivity gains. A structured approach to service management also brings IT into alignment with business goals, standardizing the delivery of services based on budgets, resources, and results. It reduces costs and risks, and ultimately improves the customer experience.

Most common benefits of ITSM to include:

• Aligning IT teams with business priorities tracked through success metrics
• Enabling cross-department collaboration
• Bringing IT teams and development teams together through streamlined project management approaches
• Empowering IT teams to share knowledge and continuously improve
• Improving request coordination for more efficient service
• Promoting customer-centricity with self-service and better processes
• Responding more quickly to major incidents, and preventing future ones

All of which decrease costs and lead to better service.

ITSM processes

ITIL version 4 (compared to version 3) recently shifted from recommending ITSM “processes” to introduce 34 ITSM “practices.” Their reasoning for this updated terminology is so that “elements such as culture, technology, information and data management can be considered to get a holistic vision of the ways of working.” This more comprehensive approach better reflects the realities of modern organizations.

It’s important, and true regardless of what framework the team follows, the modern IT service teams use organizational resources and follow repeatable procedures to deliver consistent, efficient service. In fact, leveraging practice or process is what distinguishes ITSM from IT. Core ITSM processes include:

Service Request Management

Service request management is a repeatable procedure for handling the wide variety of customer service requests, like requests for access to applications, software enhancements, and hardware updates. The service request workstream often involves recurring requests, and benefits greatly from enabling customers with knowledge and automating certain tasks.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

IT Asset Management

IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.

Incident Management

Incident management is the process to respond to an unplanned event or service interruption and restore the service to its operational state. Considering all the software services organizations rely on today, there are more potential failure points than ever, so this process must be ready to quickly respond to and resolve issues.

Problem Management

Problem management is the process of identifying and managing the causes of incidents on an IT service. Problem management isn’t just about finding and fixing incidents, but identifying and understanding the underlying causes of an incident as well as identifying the best method to eliminate the root causes.

Change Management

Change management ensures standard procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to IT infrastructure, whether it’s rolling out new services, managing existing ones, or resolving problems in the code. Effective change management provides context and transparency to avoid bottlenecks, while minimizing risk.

For this initial list of ITIL practices, start where it’s been adopting the practices that make the most sense. The team can grow from there, learning along the way and adapting as the organization evolves.

ITSM Frameworks

IT teams leverage a variety of frameworks to guide their work. The most common ones are DevOps and ITIL, though there are numerous other concepts, like COBIT, SIAM, IT4IT, lean, and more.

In this document, we’ll cover two of the most influential frameworks for modern IT teams DevOps and ITIL-- along with a common approach and related to the ITSM methodology.

DevOps

DevOps emphasizes accelerated IT service delivery enabled by agile and lean practices. DevOps improves collaboration between development and IT operations teams, so organizations can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. The promised benefits include increased trust, faster software releases, an ability to solve critical issues quickly, and better management of unplanned work.

Though DevOps includes continuous development, integration, and automated delivery, the concept is founded on building a culture of collaboration between teams that historically functioned in relative siloes. Much of the context and ethos behind DevOps is about moving away from old divisions and working together – collaboratively. Unfortunately, this is often seen as pertaining just to ‘Dev’ and not ‘Ops’.

ITSM and DevOps are typically pitched against each other, as an ‘either/or’ decision – “we are an ITSM or a DevOps house.” There is confusion about what ITSM and DevOps deliver and how they could work together. Modern, high performing teams realize that they need to both be able to work smarter and quicker, but still require process and control.

It’s time to move beyond the ITSM vs DevOps ultimatum and use elements of both - whether you explicitly follow frameworks or not. DevOps is much more than just automated development, and promotes the importance of collaboration and a blame-free culture. Moreover, ITSM and the ITIL approach shouldn't be pigeonholed as an administrative burden, but used in an agile way to fit the unique needs of different organizations.

ITIL

What is ITIL?

ITIL is a set of practices. Its primary purpose is to provide a systematic approach to IT service management (ITSM). Since its creation, the ITIL framework has undergone several revisions. Today, these revisions span four versions and five books. Each book contains guidelines surrounding the various processes and phases of the IT service lifecycle.

ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to ITSM. ITIL focuses on practices for aligning IT services with business needs. ITIL can help organizations adapt to ongoing transformation and scale. ITIL 4, the recent update to ITIL standards, represents a paradigm shift for IT teams. It guides teams to a holistic, business and customer-value frame of reference, and encourages a more flexible approach based on how your team works. The ITIL 4 Guiding Principles promote collaboration, simplicity, and feedback.

ITIL is sometimes misrepresented as “the rules,” rather than guidance, that is open for interpretation. Yet, just because we need to use process and document work, doesn’t mean we should generate cumbersome masses of records and bureaucratic overhead. There is no excuse for hiding behind processes or the ITIL “rules.”

ITIL Processes

The ITIL framework can be broken down into five stages.

1. Service strategy

The phrase service strategy refers to the phase of the ITIL process that syncs business goals with the IT service lifecycle. Service strategy has four subcategories:

• Service portfolio management. A service portfolio is the scope of services the service provider manages. Managing this portfolio requires each service to be identified and evaluated to establish its role in the IT process. Service portfolio management includes the Service Pipeline, Service Catalog, and Retired Services.
• Demand management. IT professionals use user profiles and Patterns of Business Activity (PBA) to analyze and influence customer demand for better customer satisfaction.
• Financial management. All accounting, budgeting, and transactional processes associated with the IT department occur during this phase of the ITIL framework.
• Strategy operations. During the strategy operations phase, it’s essential to ensure routine IT operations are running smoothly and efficiently. This phase provides an opportunity to reexamine the current strategic approach.

2. Service design

The service design phase of the ITIL framework focuses on seven processes and the Four Ps of Service Design. Its primary goal is to prevent costly service disruptions that arise in response to inefficient workflow. Each of the Ps represents an area of focus crucial to consider when designing the IT service infrastructure. The seven service design processes

• Service catalog management. A service catalog is the subset of IT services directly available to customers. Typically, these are the offerings within the larger service portfolio visible to users.
• Service level management. Service level management refers to the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) made between the customer and the IT provider. These agreements represent the agreed-upon performance of a system or service.
• Availability management. The availability management process deals with the ability of a system or service to function when the customer requests it. Availability requirements are established in the SLA agreements secured during the service level management process above.
• Capacity management. ITIL defines capacity as the “maximum throughput a service, system, or device can handle.” There are three primary areas of focus involved with capacity management—Business Capacity Management (BCM), Service Capacity Management (SCM), and Component Capacity Management (CCM).
• Service continuity management. This component of the ITIL foundation is often referred to as IT service continuity management (ITSCM). It secures the service provider's ability to meet the agreed-upon service-level threshold. Techniques involved with ITSCM include Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Management of Risk (MOR).
• IT security management. IT security management is centered around five major qualities: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and non-repudiation.
• Supplier management. Supplier management ensures that the organization receives the agreed-upon service levels from its partners. It’s similar to service level management, but unlike service management, it deals with internal negotiations.

3. Service transition

This ITIL phase coordinates the building, testing, and deployment of IT services. Plans must include the configuration of hardware and software, the readying of production environments, and the management of support personnel. Seven processes exist under service transition:

• Change management: The primary goal of change management is to minimize IT service disruptions resulting from change.
• Evaluation: The evaluation process requires the assessment of new services or significant changes to existing services.
• Transition planning and support: The transition planning and support process is used to coordinate and budget resources for upcoming releases.
• Release and deployment management: This process includes planning, scheduling, and migrating releases from the testing environment to the live environment. It is essential to maintain the integrity of the live environment.
• Service validation and testing: Once releases have been deployed, it’s critical to ensure they meet user expectations. Another important aspect of service validation and testing is the IT team’s ability to support the new release.
• Service asset and configuration management: This process is concerned with relationship management. It involves all elements related to the configuration of IT services and the connections they have to one another.
• Knowledge management: Knowledge management is an efficiency-boosting process. The objective is to collect, organize, maintain, and share information organization-wide.

4. Service operations

This phase of the ITIL framework caters to meeting end-user expectations. It includes five processes and four functions.

ITIL service operations processes

• Event management. Event management verifies that configuration items (CI) and services are consistently monitored and that any issues are reported and escalated to the appropriate parties.
• Incident management. This process aims to return services to normal operation swiftly after a disruption.
• Request fulfillment. Service requests should be acknowledged and resolved as soon as possible.
• Access management. Access management is the process of granting authorized users access to services. It also encompasses activities related to protecting those services from unauthorized users. It is sometimes referred to as rights management or identity management.
• Problem management. The problem management process includes both incident prevention and incident impact management.

ITIL service operations functions

• IT operations management. IT operations management is the function that oversees all functions. It includes monitoring and controlling the entire IT service infrastructure, from routine tasks and maintenance to job scheduling.
• Service desk. The service desk is the portal in which help desk technicians connect with customers. Its primary functions are incident resolution, communication, and service request management.
• Application management. Application management oversees applications throughout the entirety of their life cycles.
• Technical management. Technical management supports the IT infrastructure through expertise and support.

5. Continual Service Improvement (CSI)

The fifth ITIL phase is ongoing; hence its focus on continual improvement. The goal is to continually improve the efficiency and quality of IT services and infrastructure. CSI analyzes past performance and uses quality management methods to improve existing processes. One seven-step process comprises CSI:

1. Identifying improvement strategies

2. Defining what will be measured

3. Gathering data

4. Processing data

5. Analyzing data

6. Presenting and using the information drawn from the data

7. Using the information to improve

References:

• https://www.atlassian.com/itsm
• https://www.coursera.org/articles/what-is-itil
• https://www.atlassian.com/itsm/itil