ITSM

The evolution of ITSM over the last 20 years has had a tremendous impact on business, budgeting and resourcing within organizations of all sizes. With the advent of expensive personal computing solutions came the network. In little more than a historic blink of an eye the network became a massive, complex and costly combination of servers, switches, routers, firewalls and printers. Little used more than 40 years ago, IT is now an inescapable and irreplaceable part of every organization. From PDAs to email servers, companies depend on IT and when it doesn’t run smoothly the entire organization suffers. With costly overhead and investment in the nuts and bolts of these systems it is easy to forget the most important component – the people necessary to run the systems and make sure the business derives value from IT.

ITSM fills the gap between the people and technology, providing the tools, processes and procedures to manage the IT ecosystem of an organization, to monitor the services delivered and to provide a management level overview of quality of the services being delivered. ITSM tells us what we have, how successful we are at delivering it and helps to balance the cost of a service against the total expense of keeping and maintaining that service.

The core of modern ITSM is wrapped around the ITIL methodology and framework. Although ITIL is not required for ITSM it enhances it by providing a common set of processes, terminology and measures to make the evaluation of ITSM consistent and easily understood. This has lead to radical improvement in the industry and created the ability for organizations to make like for like comparisons that previously were not possible.

A simple example of this is the concept of an ‘issue’ raised by a employee who’s computer is not functioning. Prior to ITIL organizations had a series of diverse and subjective definitions of what ‘it is’. The issue itself may have been called an issue, ticket, problem, incident, service request, complaint or trouble ticket. By providing a common set of definitions and terminology ITIL standardizes the concepts across not only a single company but all businesses.

Modern ITSM goes a step beyond the device or asset and looks at the value derived from the business. The business is not concerned with a series of servers, the business is focused on the email service provided by those servers. By re-focusing the IT organization on the business value derived ITSM is enabling organizations to identify the value they provide while managing and enhancing that value within their organization.

The focus of any IT department should be on providing the maximum value to their organization. This value focus has two primary thrusts – the first is to minimize the cost and overhead required for existing services and the second is to provide new and optimized services to the organization to solve business challenges.

ITSM tackles both of these challenges head on. By connecting the technology, processes and procedures with the technology providers – the IT support department – ITSM gives organizations the ability to define and monitor tangible, measureable goals. Business decisions can then be made on facts and figures rather than opinions and well meaning but misguided decision makers caught up in the latest trends.

As organizations evolve, ITSM provides the framework to establish, define and deploy new services to the organization. By responding to business needs and formalizing the deployment of solutions, ITSM helps put services in place with the framework and management processes to ensure that new services can be tied to value in the business and thereby justify costs and overhead.

The most straightforward value to be derived by end users from ITSM rests within the ITILv3 concept of ‘Continued Service Improvement’. Services are not deployed and then left to grow organically. ITSM creates a management framework and establishes responsibilities within an organization to continually monitor, evaluate and improve on existing services. Far from being a static – get it out the door – management framework, ITSM looks at the current situation while providing the input needed to enhance and look to the future.