IT Service Management (ITSM) - What is it, and what are the benefits?

IT Service Management (Or ITSM) is a strategic approach to designing, implementing, managing, and delivering IT services. 

ITSM incorporates all processes crucial for accommodating the needs of an organization and its stakeholders to generate value. 

Imagine your keyboard broke, and you urgently need one to keep up with your daily tasks. How would you go about requesting a new one? 

Usually, through your company's service desk, you can create a request in a matter of minutes and submit the issue via the service desk - that's all it takes. The IT department will receive your request, process it, and prioritize it to ensure your new equipment is delivered on time to continue your work. 

IT service management encompasses various IT services, from hardware to software to cloud platforms. Sometimes misjudged as elementary IT support, ITSM takes over the management responsibilities of end-to-end IT services. 

Benefits of ITSM

• Improves operational efficiency 
• Reduce costs 
• Improves employee & company productivity
• Risk-free implementation of IT changes
• Brings customer experience to the next level
• Improve visibility into operations and performance 
• Streamlines communication with the clients and team 
• Documented processes and practices

What are the processes of ITSM?

ITSM processes include:

1 - Service request management

Service request management automates and resolves incoming service requests like software upgrades, hardware changes, access requests, etc. In addition to helping the company keep its SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

2 - Knowledge management

Knowledge management is a common practice in companies where they document, manage and share the knowledge or data of an organization through the use of knowledge bases. Clients or team members can quickly find answers to their most common questions through these methods.

Confluence is one of the most popular software for documenting data. It is not only a powerful knowledge base, but also a highly collaborative wiki tool with multiple features. 

3- IT asset management (ITAM)

IT asset management can be defined as practices and processes that support life cycle management and strategic decision-making for the IT environment. IT asset management assembles essential information like a business's hardware, software, and cloud-based IT inventory used to create databases and keep critical information in one place. 

4 - Incident Management

As the name suggests, incident management responds to unexpected incidents that can disrupt an organization, returning the performance of the affected enterprise to normal as soon as possible without negative impacts on the core business. Incidents are usually documented, and the process of solving them is recorded to avoid future issues. 

5 - Problem Management

A problem is the leading cause of an incident. Incident management focuses on offering quick help and returning performance to standard. In contrast, problem management finds the core problem of an incident and permanently fixes the issue to improve the quality of the service and performance. 

6 - Change Management

Change management ensures that fixed procedures are in place when dealing with changes to the IT infrastructure, whether it be managing existing services, introducing new ones or resolving coding problems. 

What are ITSM tools?

Successful implementation of ITSM practices needs tools that provide potent capabilities to manage complex processes and tasks. In addition, companies should consider flexible solutions that facilitate customer communication, generate reports, maintain ticketing systems, and identify errors or bugs in products or services that affect overall performance.

An excellent example of a comprehensive ITSM Tool is Jira Service Management. Jira Service Management, formerly known as Jira Service Desk, is a powerful ITSM Solution integrated with Jira to Empower Dev, IT Ops, and business teams to collaborate at high velocity. 

Read more about Jira Service Management here.

Our next blog post will discuss the difference between ITSM and ITIL. So stay tuned to learn more. 

If you are interested in implementing ITSM in your organization or improving the quality of your service desk to provide the best experience for your customers, don hesitate to contact us!