What Is ITSM? IT Service Management Explained

Nothing scares IT personnel more than poor user experience, unplanned downtime, or a chaotic system. IT operations need a well-structured approach to delivering and managing IT services. And IT service management (ITSM) is the solution.

ITSM helps align business goals with IT services, optimize IT investments, improve customer satisfaction, and improve workflow efficiency.

In this article, you'll learn about ITSM and explore its frameworks. Furthermore, we'll examine the common benefits of ITSM, the difference between ITSM and ITOM, and tracking changes in ITSM. Additionally, we'll look into the metrics of ITSM, what to look for in ITSM, and the challenges associated with ITSM.

Let's get started!

What is ITSM?

ITSM, which stands for IT service management, is a strategy for delivering IT services and support to an organization, its employees, customers, and business partners. ITSM focuses on:

• Understanding end users’ expectations.
• Improving the quality of both IT services and the delivery of those services.

In the early days of computers, employees relied on the company IT department for help whenever a computer issue arose. Over time, however, scalability problems emerged as businesses significantly expanded computer infrastructure, giving rise to a formalized service desk—or “help desk” model—in the early 1980s.

ITIL first codified the best practices for ITSM in 1989, transforming IT service from a reactive to a proactive function that aligned with the needs of the entire business. Although businesses have relied on other ITSM frameworks such as COBIT, Six Sigma, and TOGAF, the ITIL framework remains the de facto standard.

ITSM helps organizations become more efficient and responsive by streamlining operations and automating many service requests. By extension, it boosts employee productivity, improves customer experience, and results in greater overall user satisfaction—all of which translate to better business outcomes. In the following sections, we'll:

• Look at the different ITSM tools and frameworks available.
• Outline the discipline’s many benefits.
• Show how you can formalize ITSM in your organization.

Exploring ITSM Frameworks

ITSM frameworks outline the processes and policies for effectively deploying and managing these services. While the most popular is ITIL, other commonly used frameworks include Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), and Business Process Framework (eTOM).

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

ITIL provides a comprehensive set of best practices for managing IT services from service design, delivery, and continuous improvement. It's also the most widely used ITSM framework.

Some of the components of ITIL are as follows:

• Service Strategy: ITIL understands customer needs, and defines a service to be rendered.
• Service Design: ITIL considers factors like capacity, security, and availability when planning and designing IT services.
• Service Transition: ITIL manages the change, deployment, and testing phases of a service.
• Operation: ITIL manages the day-to-day services for efficient value delivery.

Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT)

Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) focuses on alignment of IT processes with business objectives.

Some of the components of COBIT are:

• Align, Plan, and Organize (APO): COBIT manages the IT strategy, budgeting, and resource allocation.
• Evaluate, Direct, and Monitor (EDM): It sets the motion for governance objectives and monitoring performance.
• Build, Acquire, and Implement: COBIT manages both the development and deployment of IT services.

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)

Microsoft developed MOF, a popular ITSM framework, to help organizations effectively manage their IT services, focusing on operational efficiency.

Key components of MOF are:

• Plan: MOF helps to plan and strategize services to meet business needs.
• Delivery: MOF assists in deploying and managing services in production.
• Operate: It helps to monitor and maintain IT services.

ISO/IEC 20000

ISO/IEC 20000 aligns closely with ITIL to provide certification for qualified organizations. It's an international standard for ITSM, with the mandate for delivering managed services.

Some key components of ISO/EIC 20000 are:

• Service Delivery: ISO/EIC 20000 ensures service delivery based on the agreed service levels.
• Relationship: Manage the relationships between customers and suppliers.
• Resolution: Effectively handles problems and incidents.
• Release: Ensures smooth transition of new services.

These and other predefined processes detailed in ITSM frameworks provide IT with structure and guidelines for organizing and improving their established and new services. Instead of having to develop their processes from scratch, IT teams can increase efficiency and minimize risk by following a map that hundreds of other organizations have road-tested.

Common benefits of ITSM

Some of the benefits ITSM brings to IT service and support include:

• Consistency: Uniformity of ITSM infrastructure helps businesses to standardize their IT processes and improve the speed and quality of IT operations.
• Increased Efficiency: By implementing automation and other technology-enabled workflows, teams can eliminate the need to manually perform repetitive, lower-level tasks and simplify processes like ticketing and incident management so they can focus on higher-value tasks.
• Service-Based Incident Management: ITSM prioritizes service failure recovery time, helping to reduce the number of recurring issues and minimize their impact.
• Reduced Downtime: ITSM allows IT teams to anticipate and prevent issues that could cause service or business interruptions and help the business recover more quickly when an issue does occur.
• Lower Operational Costs: ITSM’s streamlined processes and task automation reduce the IT team’s manual workload, allowing IT to scale operations without over-hiring.
• Greater Accountability: Service standardization, which relies on documented processes for every type of IT service, creates deep visibility into how IT services are delivered, allowing IT managers to provide consistent and compliant service delivery across the organization.
• Improved Risk Management: ITSMs help mitigate risks such as system failures and data breaches associated with IT operations.
• Scalability: ITSM can adapt to organization expansion to manage larger workloads, which ensures smooth scaling of IT operations.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: ITSM comprises tools and processes that help attend to customer queries promptly, thereby improving customer satisfaction.
• Increased Cost-Effectiveness: ITSM supports informed decisions by providing valuable insights and data. It also helps organizations lower IT operational expenses by streamlining resource utilization.

ITSM vs. ITOM: What's the difference?

ITSM (IT Service Management) is a practice for managing the life cycle of IT services through the design, delivery, and improvement phases. It's also the pivotal alignment of business needs with IT services. ITOM (IT Operations Management) is to ensure systems are run smoothly and efficiently by managing the day-to-day operational aspects of an organization. Both ITSM and ITOM are essential parts of effective IT management. Some of the differences between ITOM and ITSM are as follows:

(Know the differences: ITSM vs. IT Operations Management.)

Objectives

• ITSM ensures that the IT services needs of businesses are delivered promptly.
• ITOM ensures availability and maintains the performance of IT infrastructure.

Primary Concern

• ITSM is primarily tasked with delivering IT services to end users.
• ITOM's task is to manage the health and performance of IT resources.

Functions

• ITSM functions are problem management, configuration management, service desk, and change management.
• ITOM functions are capacity planning, backup and recovery,  performance monitoring, and network and server monitoring.

Focus

• ITSM ensures end users receive the appropriate IT services. It revolves around service and incident request resolution.
• ITOM ensures uptime and prevents disruptions by focusing on back-end processes that support IT services.

ITSM in a DevOps world

Both ITSM and DevOps are ways of creating and managing technology, but on the surface, they seem to take very different approaches. ITSM employs repeatable frameworks and clearly defined roles and responsibilities to bring standardization and governance to the delivery life cycle. DevOps emphasizes speed, agility, and breaking down silos in software delivery. Although DevOps adheres to core values like collaboration, transparency, and open communication, there's no official document of best practices to guide it.

This has led to some popular misconceptions about what ITSM and DevOps do and how they work—or don’t work—together. Some of the most common mistakes are as follows.

DevOps Is a replacement for ITSM

Lots of organizations mistakenly believe that ITSM and DevOps are mutually exclusive methodologies. In actuality, support, governance, budgeting, and other ITSM functions are requirements of every modern business that DevOps doesn’t address.

DevOps is all about automation and continuous development

Practices like CI/CD and automated delivery may be the most popular aspects of DevOps, but it’s a mistake to think they are its total. At its core, DevOps is about fostering a culture of collaboration, experimentation, learning, and blamelessness around a shared goal.

ITSM Is too process-intensive and slows teams down

ITSM indeed relies on process frameworks, but these aren’t rigidly applied rules. Frameworks like ITIL are meant to guide, not dictate, decisions so that businesses can quickly understand and organize complex IT processes, ultimately helping teams streamline operations and service delivery rather than slowing them down.

Only big enterprises need ITSM

While large enterprises were the earliest champions of ITSM, startups and midsized organizations also need IT structure, and ITSM strategies of change management, configuration management, problem management, and incident management offer as much to these businesses as they do to large enterprises.

Rather than choosing a side, organizations should view ITSM and DevOps as complementary practices that both deliver business value. High-performing teams find a way to balance the process controls of ITSM with DevOps velocity and collaboration to maximize the benefits of both.

Tracking change management in ITSM

In ITSM, change management is a practice that minimizes the disruption of IT service transition when a change is made to the technology infrastructure. A formal, well-documented change management process keeps all service providers and other stakeholders in the loop and allows changes to be rolled back if they aren’t initiated successfully.

ITIL4 defines three types of changes:

• Standard changes: A low-risk, pre-authorized change is often initiated as a service request that can also be an operational change. After creating or modifying the procedure for a standard change, a full risk assessment and authorization is required.
• Normal changes: A change that has to be scheduled, assessed, and authorized following a stated process. A local team or supervisor can authorize low-risk normal changes, while major normal changes may require board-level authorization.
• Emergency changes: A change is implemented as soon as possible and not usually included in a change schedule, which often expedites the process for assessment and authorization so that the change can be implemented quickly. These changes should be subjected to the same testing, assessment, and authorization as normal changes, when possible, but scheduling and documentation are deprioritized.

Managing ITSM changes

To manage these changes, teams follow a series of clearly defined steps designed to implement the changes without interrupting workflows or surprising users and management.

Under ITIL guidelines, change management usually starts with a user-generated request for change (RFC). IT teams evaluate the proposed change to determine its type, urgency, and scheduling within other planned changes.

The change is then submitted to the appropriate decision-makers for authorization. Often, this will include a change advisory board (CAB) that assesses, prioritizes, and approves changes.

If the change isn’t approved, it can be updated and resubmitted for approval later. If the change receives full approval, the release management team then tests, integrates, and deploys it. Once implemented, the change management team follows up to ensure the change has the desired outcome.

Metrics and KPIs for ITSM

Most ITSM tools track dozens of metrics, but ultimately, data should help IT service managers understand how well their teams are performing.

To that end, these metrics are among the most important:

• Cost per ticket: This metric helps understand the efficiency of IT service and support. Just divide the service desk’s total monthly operating expenses (salaries, tech and facility expenses, office supplies, etc.) by the number of tickets per month.
• Customer satisfaction: There often is no better indicator of how well an organization’s IT service and support is performing than how happy its users are.
• First-contact resolution: This measures the percentage of tickets resolved during the initial contact with the user. Higher first-contact resolution rates strongly correlate to high customer satisfaction.
• Technician utilization: This measures labor efficiency and is tightly bound to cost per ticket. High technician utilization usually leads to a low cost per ticket and low tech utilization results in a higher cost per ticket.
• First-level resolution: An indicator of total cost of ownership (TCO), this helps reveal the true efficiency of IT support. A Level 1 service desk, for example, may have a low cost per ticket because it is escalating issues to higher support levels, creating the impression that the service desk is very efficient when it’s also increasing TCO.
• Technician job satisfaction: Not surprisingly, high technician job satisfaction translates to lower turnover and absenteeism, but it also correlates to higher first-contact resolution rates and lower handling times. The net result is lower cost per ticket and higher customer satisfaction.
• Mean time to resolve/repair (MTTR): This service-level metric measures in business hours how long it takes on average to resolve an issue from the time a ticket is opened until it’s closed.

Using Automation and AI in ITSM

Automated workflows and other AI implementations in ITSM offer a range of benefits, including:

• Greater operational efficiencies: Automation speeds IT service desk tasks and reduces the amount of manual, repetitive labor for IT operations, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities. The ability to automate these processes also makes service operations easier, as it doesn’t rely so heavily on retraining staff.
• Faster incident resolution: Common, straightforward fixes such as rebooting a server can be done with the click of a button, eliminating the need for a user to track down the appropriate technician and wait until they’re available to help.
• Reduced costs: Automation leads to labor savings by reducing manual work and eliminating the costs of correcting human errors.
• Better feedback collection: Automation makes it easier to gather user input without IT staff having to spend valuable time directly interacting with them, leading to continual service improvement.
• Improved user satisfaction: Automation cultivates more positive experiences for users through self-help options, shorter wait times, and speedier issue resolution.

Key features to consider in ITSM software

If frameworks are critical for establishing ITSM processes, ITSM tools are essential for supporting them, going beyond help desk management to simplify IT processes. Software platforms make it easier to discover assets, maintain ticketing systems, track and resolve issues, and uncover opportunities for service delivery improvements. Features will vary across platforms, but at a minimum, an effective ITSM tool will offer the following:

Asset management

Effective ITSM depends on deep visibility into and control of all hardware and IT assets. An ITSM tool should allow you to easily track these assets and manage their configurations, licenses, and incidents throughout their life cycle.

Problem and incident management

ITSM tools typically include automating problem and incident management to help IT head off issues before they impact end users. They may also use machine learning to filter out the noise in log and event data, identify patterns in anomalies, and cut out a problem’s root cause.

Ticketing

Ticketing is still the foundation of IT service, and a good ITSM tool will make it easier to execute project management functions, such as tracking requests and assigning work based on team members’ technical experience.

Self-Service portal

Some ITSM tools offer a self-service portal that empowers employees to find solutions without directly involving IT. An employee, for example, can request a new laptop without having to wait on hold for an available tech to answer the phone. Self-service IT service provisioning is especially important in DevOps organizations, where speed and autonomy are critical.

Advanced analytics and reporting

A worthwhile ITSM tool will allow users to create intuitive, real-time dashboards and run customized reports to help IT understand performance, identify areas in need of improvement, and help you create or refine your service strategy. Analytics tools driven by AI/ML can generate these insights in near-real time, giving you a market edge over your competitors.

IT service model ready

An ITSM tool integrated with ITIL or another framework of best practices will allow organizations to more easily implement ITSM.

Organizational needs should always drive the choice of an ITSM tool, rather than a particular feature set. That makes it important to identify the most business-critical service delivery and support processes while also determining where you can increase efficiency, reduce pain points, and improve user experience with automation or self-service capabilities.

Challenges of ITSM

ITSM offers several benefits, like ensuring that IT services align with the organization's needs and improving service quality and efficiency. However, there can be a few challenges often faced by organizations when implementing the ITSM style. Some of the challenges are as follows:

Complexity

ITSM frameworks are difficult to understand and implement, and it's also difficult to integrate with existing systems and processes.

Few skilled personnel

ITSM requires skilled and trained personnel who know the nitty-gritty of the tools and best practices. Because of the unavailability of skilled personnel, ITSM leads to inefficiencies.

High implementation cost

ITSM is expensive to set up due to software licensing and integration. This upfront cost may discourage small to medium-sized organizations from adopting.

Resistance to change

Employees are always hesitant to adopt new tools and processes because it'll disrupt their existing workflows and routines.

Compliance and security

Industries with strict compliance requirements find it complex to use ITSM as it's difficult to ensure compliance with regulatory bodies.

Wrapping up

IT is the lifeblood of every modern organization. Historically, though, it has struggled to meet the needs of its users due to disjointed systems, ad-hoc processes, and cumbersome workloads. ITSM brings coherence to IT through clear roles, repeatable processes, and automated workflows.

In this post, we covered ITSM and explored its frameworks. Furthermore, we also examine the common benefits of ITSM, the difference between ITSM and ITOM, and tracking changes in ITSM. Lastly, we looked into the metrics of ITSM, what to look for in ITSM, and the challenges associated with ITSM.