Does my IT department really need ITSM

Silly question, right? Well, not really. It’s important to understand why IT Service Management (ITSM) is needed and how it will benefit your company.

ITSM is a "means to an end” rather than the end itself.

Information Technology (IT) departments need to have an ITSM discipline. ITSM is at the heart of the delivery of IT services. ITSM is a strategic approach to designing, delivering, managing and improving IT within an organization. To simplify; ITSM manages IT capabilities to improve business performance.

So, what separates ITSM from other practices such as network management? ITSM ensures that any efforts to develop and improve IT systems stay inline with an enterprise's overall business goals. ITSM delivers IT services and support to internal customers through people, processes, and technology.

Many companies are doing elements of ITSM even if they do not think they are, or label it as such. Non-existent formal processes, reactive teams, and silos are components of an IT department that does not recognize ITSM.

An ITSM strategy advocates a more preventative, proactive focus that emphasizes continuous development. This is beneficial as it allows companies to get ahead of pending issues and always be ready in their ever-changing environment.

ITSM takes development focus away from creating solutions tailored to the needs of users within the business and asks instead how IT services can be customer-centric.

For clarification: ITSM is NOT a framework. ITSM is the discipline that has many best practice frameworks. No one owns the item trademark ITSM. Examples of ITSM frameworks are the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Six Sigma, Microsoft Operations Framework(MoF), Prince2, CObIT, and many others. These frameworks help to realize the ITSM vision.

ITSM takes into consideration the people, processes, and technology that will allow an IT organization to do many things for the business. It will lower cost, increase profit margins, increase customer satisfaction, increase governance, and control, increase productivity, improve perception, reduce risk and confusion.

Now that we have ITSM and you have selected the right framework for your organization the next step will be to look for a tool to make the framework mold to your needs. Salesforce, Service-Now, ZenDesk and Jira/Confluence are just a few of the tools that you will need to consider to fully bring alive the ITSM journey.

With ITSM, your selected framework(most famous ITIL) and chosen tool will help you set your roadmap. Most companies do not start with implementing all of the ITIL processes as that would be a huge undertaking. I would recommend a simple roadmap starting with incident and requests, then change, then problem management to get you started.

What ITSM framework are you using? What challenges are you facing today with your ITSM?

#itil; #itsm; #ITSMF