Why IT Service Management Should Matter To You

IT service management (ITSM) has made its way onto the agendas of both global businesses and large and medium enterprises. Yet there are many companies that don't fully understand what service management involves and what it can deliver to your entire company (including IT). There are also many organizations that think they have implemented ITSM, when in reality all they have done is implemented a service desk. Others have adopted additional best practices from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) foundation and are well on their way to the journey of service management. Unfortunately, too few companies fall into the latter category, leaving a great deal of confusion still surrounding ITSM.

WHAT IS IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT?

ITIL defines IT service management as: The delivery and support of IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of an organization.

ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent, and coherent set of best practice processes for ITSM, promoting a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems.

However, before you can truly understand what's involved in the management of services, you must first understand the types of services being managed. Several types are:

Technical services. These focus on the delivery of the service related to a technical subject area. Examples include voice and network services, database services, backup and restore services, desktop services, and Windows administration services.

Organizational services. These focus on a specific organization or role in the company. Examples are sales support services, human resource services, marketing services, and research and development services.

Application services. These focus on a particular end-user business application. Examples are email services and ERP services. Sometimes they're even more specific, and the name of the particular business application appears in the name of the service, such as SAP services.(see endnote 1) Typically, the firms that have defined services have a good understanding in regard to the requirements of the service, the resources it uses, and how to deliver it. The difficulty arises when services are dependent on or have an impact on other services. This is exactly what service management is about.

EFFECTIVE ITSM:

In a recent survey of enterprises across North America and Europe, only 17% had already implemented parts of ITIL or COBIT, and 16% were planning on implementing ITIL or COBIT within the next 12 months.(see endnote 2) This means that these companies are currently going through this transition (see Figure 2). In many client inquiries, Forrester finds that IT organizations have implemented aspects of ITIL but fail to call it ITIL. The major benefits of leveraging ITIL are its structured approach to managing IT, the delivery of its services, and the introduction of a common language across the different domains or working groups. Additionally, almost all of the IT management software vendors have adopted ITIL language into the naming and grouping of their solutions. The effective use of service management can bring a lot of benefits to the organization, and through service management an alignment of IT and business is possible.

Figure 1: ITIL V2 Key Elements

Figure 2: ITIL Or COBIT Adoption In 2007