What is ITSM?
(IT Service Management)

ITSM Made Easy

ITSM is complicated, so we’re going to cut through the jargon, break ITSM into its elements, and address some common misconceptions.
We did all the Googling and shouting for you,
find all the information you need below.

Let’s Define ITSM

If ITSM is the art of making a business run, that begs some questions. How does a business run? For whom? For what purpose? With what tools?

To begin answering those questions, let’s break down ITSM into five areas of concern:

• End-Users: Employees and customers who use IT services
• Services: Applications, hardware, infrastructure, etc. provided by IT
• Quality: Solving IT problems effectively and efficiently
• Cost: Getting the most out of an IT budget
• Business: Enabling a company to perform its core functions and achieve its goal

The Generic IT and Business Benefits from ITSM

Imagine an awkward party where two groups, who don’t always get along, are hanging out. One group includes the IT professionals who serve a company. The other group includes the end-users who depend on IT for services. End users could be employees of the company, partners, or customers. The silence is painful. Someone asks about the weather. No one is having that much fun. Then ITSM arrives and fixes all the awkwardness. Done right, it achieves the following benefits:

Benefits for IT

Gain a better understanding of what the business needs and why (i.e. “business alignment”).

• Repeatable and scalable processes
• Defined roles and responsibilities
• Increased productivity
• Satisfied end users with realistic expectations
• Shorter gaps between detecting incidents and solving them
• Prevention of IT issues before they happen
• Ability to identify and address repeat problems
• Analytics to measure and improve IT’s performance

Benefits for the Business

• IT can react quickly to change and innovation in the market
• Better IT availability and performance means employees get more done
• IT issues are less common, less impactful, and less costly
• Employees know what services are available and how to use them
• IT provides better service at a lower cost
• Business complies with regulatory requirements no one wants to think about

When ITSM runs smoothly, that once-awkward party becomes one of those epic evenings that ought to be memorialized with stone tablets (or impulsive tattoos). It’s that good.

Tip: You can use these lists of benefits to build your case for investing in ITSM.

ITIL – the ITSM Best Practice Framework

What is ITIL?

The difference between IT and formalized ITSM is the underlying set of processes. ITSM organizations obsess over consistency, best practices, and reducing manual labor with automation. ITSM is about optimizing IT, and that’s where ITIL comes into play.

ITIL, formerly known as the “IT Infrastructure Library,” is the most popular approach to ITSM. We consider it an “ITSM Best Practice Framework” – i.e. a set of values, processes, and strategies for executing ITSM.

ITIL is about managing IT as a service, not as a messy collection of IT components. Some IT departments focus on stuff – hardware, infrastructure, apps, etc. ITIL departments focus on the relationship between IT and end-users.

ITIL 2011, the latest edition, contains 26 ITSM processes. You take what your business needs and ignore those that don’t apply.

Where Did ITIL Emerge From?

To many people’s surprise, ITIL emerged from the UK government, which became disillusioned with the way IT was delivered in the latter half of the 1980s. The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now called the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), was tasked with developing a framework for the efficient, and financially responsible, use of IT resources. Soon enough, ITIL morphed into an ecosystem with consultancies, software, training, examinations, and membership organizations. Over 2 million people worldwide now have ITIL qualifications.

ITIL Best Practices: 4 Important Books

The best practice framework is covered in five books:

• Service Transition
• Service Design
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement.

They are ITSM’s Five Books of Moses – the closest thing we have to an ITSM bible.

You guessed right: These are not beach-reads. The five ITIL books map the entire IT service lifecycle and go well beyond what we can and should cover here. The ITIL 2011 Glossary of Terms is an essential companion for these books and is available in multiple languages.

Think of ITIL as accumulated common sense. If it’s in the book, it’s been proven. Rather than create an ITSM framework from scratch, start with ITIL.

Differentiating between ITSM and ITIL

People new to ITSM and ITIL often confuse the two terms. Here’s an easy way to differentiate them: a horse is an animal, but not all animals are horses. Likewise, ITIL is a view on how to do ITSM, but not all ITSM is ITIL.

While ITIL is the gold standard in our opinion, other frameworks do exist:

• BiSL – A framework used for information management
• COBIT – A framework for the governance and management of enterprise IT
• ISO/IEC 20000 – A service management system standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
• MOF – the Microsoft Operations Framework
• Six Sigma – a methodology with tools and techniques for process improvement
• TOGAF – an enterprise architecture methodology and framework
• USMBOK – a series of publications and references for professionals working in service provider organizations

Organizations commonly mix and match frameworks.

Towards that end, AXELOS, the company responsible for ITIL, offers a number of white papers that describe how to use ITIL in conjunction with other frameworks:

• ISO/IEC 20000: ITIL V3 and ISO/IEC 20000
• MOF: Cross-Reference ITIL V3 and MOF 4.0
• Six Sigma: Integrating Six Sigma and ITIL for continual service improvement
• TOGAF: TOGAF 9 and ITIL V3 Two Frameworks Whitepaper
• COBIT COBIT 5: Enabling Processes (For a lighter intro, try Joe the IT Guy’s An Introduction to COBIT blog post).

Note: As if this weren’t confusing enough, IT advisory and research firm Gartner has its own term: IT service support management (ITSSM). Don’t stress about the differences.

The Top ITIL Processes

ITIL 2011 has 26 ITSM processes split across the five ITIL areas (and books). Some are adopted more widely than others. The three most popular are:

• Incident management – circa 100% adoption
• Change management – circa 75%
• Problem management – circa 60%

The Most Popular ITSM and ITIL Processes Defined

The ITIL 2011 Glossary of Terms has formal definitions of every process. We’re not going to bore you with the full spiel on each. Below, we’ve listed what we consider the most important terms with links where you can find more information about each one:

• Service Desk: The point of contact that manages incidents and requests
  Work on a Service Desk? Say What You’ll Do, then Do What You Said
  5 Tips To Improve Your Service Desk’s Customer Service
• Incident Management: Restoring IT service after an unplanned interruption (a.k.a. “ticketing”)
  ITSM Basics: A Simple Introduction to Incident Management
  12 Tips For Getting Started With Incident Management
• Request Fulfillment: Providing new software or hardware or access to network resources
  5 Service Request Catalog And Self-Service Tips
• Change Management: Modifying infrastructure and applications in a controlled way with minimum disruption to users
  What Is Change Management For?
  ITSM Wars, Episode VII: The Standard Change Awakens
• Problem Management: Preventing incidents and/or minimizing their impact (a problem = a group of incidents)
  Problem Management: No Problemo
  Defining Metrics for Problem Management
• Service Catalog Management: Providing a ‘menu’ of IT services or self-service portals
  5 Tips for Creating a Successful Service Catalogue
  Self-Service: The Benefits and 5 Tips for Success
• Service Asset and Configuration Management: Controlling, monitoring, and documenting the configuration of assets that deliver services (e.g. company laptops)
  What’s the Point of Configuration Management?
  Clearing Up the Myths of CMDB
• Knowledge Management: Sharing ideas, experiences, and info to support good decision-making and prevent time-wasting searches
  Knowledge Management Is Not Just About Document Repositories
• Service Level Management: Negotiating and meeting the agreed upon service level agreements, known as “SLAs” (e.g. ticket response and resolution times)

How Can You Create an SLA that Helps to Delight Your Customers?

Differentiating Between IT Help Desk and Service Desk

Similar to the potential confusion between ITSM and ITIL, two other ITSM terms can mean different things to different people: “IT help desk” and “service desk.”

The term “IT help desk” dates to the 1980s and refers to the people that employees should contact for IT support or information. ITIL literature never mentions the IT help desk. The “service desk” is ITIL’s service-oriented term for roughly the same thing.

These days, corporate IT organizations tend to use “service desk” over “help desk.” Their end users, however, might call it the help desk anyway – hence, the confusion. (2012 HDI Practices and Salary Report, available to HDI members, has quantified usage of each term.)

If you would like to read more on this, Joe the IT Guy has written more on the distinction between the two terms in his Are You An IT Help Desk Or An IT Service Desk? blog.

The Bottom Line on ITSM

This guide has illustrated that ITSM is a wide-ranging craft that can benefit your IT organization and company. Simply put:

• ITSM increases the speed, cost-efficiency, and effectiveness of IT service
• ITSM reduces IT incidents and prevents them from happening in the first place
• By ensuring IT is available and performing, ITSM enables employees to be productive
• When business must evolve, ITSM modernizes technology without disrupting work.
• ITSM reduces risk by enforcing compliance with regulations
• A powerful but less concrete benefit of ITSM is how it changes the relationship between IT and the business.

 Too often, IT’s raison d’être is doing damage control when things inevitably malfunction. With ITSM, the IT group becomes more of an internal service provider and consultant. It learns what the business seeks to achieve and strives to introduce technology that can bring those goals to fruition.

We threw a lot of ITSM terminology at you. As long as you remember that ITSM is the art of making a business run, you got the main takeaway.

If you read through to this point, kudos! You saved yourself from a long misadventure in the web’s labyrinth of IT jargon. Don’t be shy – get in touch if you have more questions about ITSM.