Question

ITSM is one of the key functionalities for organizations and allows organizations to achieve higher customer satisfaction, reduce delivery time, and provide service support as per customer requirement. In this assignment, students need to explore various aspects of ITSM in an organisation or a company that provides IT services and explains how ITSM can enhance business proposition. Examples could be Department of Education and Training, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Jobs, Amazon, and HP.

The aim of thisis to •

• Encourage students to conduct an independent investigation into related topics from books, the Internet, and through practical investigation.

• Understand what service management means and how it is applied in practice;

• Evaluate a practical case with respect to service management best practices;

• Understand how the services create business value in a practical case;

• Understand how the service management could be developed and enhanced in practice; and

• Plan and implement service management improvements in practice.

Answer 1

The Generic IT and Business Benefits from ITSM

Imagine an awkward party where two groups, who don’t always get along, are hanging out. One group includes the IT professionals who serve a company. The other group includes the end users who depend on IT for services. End users could be employees of the company, partners, or customers. The silence is painful. Someone asks about the weather. No one is having that much fun. Then ITSM arrives and fixes all the awkwardness. Done right, it achieves the following benefits:

Benefits for IT:

• Better understanding of what the business needs and why (i.e. “business alignment”)
• Repeatable and scalable processes
• Defined roles and responsibilities
• Increased productivity
• Satisfied end users with realistic expectations
• Shorter gaps between detecting incidents and solving them
• Prevention of IT issues before they happen
• Ability to identify and address repeat problems
• Analytics to measure and improve IT’s performance

Benefits for the Business:

• IT can react quickly to change and innovation in the market
• Better IT availability and performance means employees get more done
• IT issues are less common, less impactful, and less costly
• Employees know what services are available and how to use them
• IT provides better service at a lower cost
• Business complies with regulatory requirements no one wants to think about

When ITSM runs smoothly, that once-awkward party becomes one of those epic evenings that ought to be memorialized with stone tablets (or impulsive tattoos). It’s that good.

Tip: You can use these lists of benefits to build your case for investing in ITSM

ITSM (IT Service Management)

IT service management (ITSM) is a general term that describes a strategic approach to design, deliver, manage and improve the way businesses use information technology (IT). ITSM includes all the discrete activities and processes that support a service throughout its lifecycle, from service management to change management, problem and incident management, asset management, and knowledge management.

An IT service enables access to information and processes to accomplish important business goals or otherwise provide value. IT services include the deployment and support of enterprise applications, such as Exchange Server; architecting and optimizing IT infrastructure such as storage, networking and cloud resources; creation and management of processes such as helpdesk support and troubleshootingprocedures, and other areas. IT teams must create, deploy, manage, optimize and potentially retire each service, with input from the business. Each service can have an associated service-level agreement (SLA), which codifies the expectations of performance and availability and the ramifications if the service falls below these expectations.

IT service delivery is generally discussed in terms of providers and customers, who interact via the IT service desk. An IT service provider selects, designs, deploys and operates the service. The provider can be an internal IT department or a third-party specialist. An IT service customer is any consumer of those services, such as the employee who accesses email through the organization's Exchange Outlook interface. IT organizations generally offer customers an IT service catalog, a list or menu of available services.

There are many roles within the IT service desk. IT services typically start with a need and strategy, and this demands clear guidance from business and IT leaders. Services must then be architected and deployed, requiring the expertise of IT hardware and software application engineers. Services must be monitored and tracked, and problems remediated by IT administrators and helpdesk staff. Key performance indicators (KPIs) for the service must be communicated, with recommendations for service changes and improvements, to the business that uses them.

The benefits of ITSM include business-IT alignment, predictable IT performance and costs, and continual improvement in terms of IT effectiveness and capabilities. When IT processes are orderly and well-managed, organizations can spend less time on proverbial firefighting and devote it to strategic initiatives.

ITSM processes

To manage IT services, organizations must control the service's capabilities, how it performs, changes to it and what happens when it experiences problems. These processes fall under several main categories, primarily defined by ITIL, but appearing in various forms in the other ITSM frameworks.

Change management. When a service is out of step with business expectations, it must be modified, expanded or otherwise altered. IT must determine how these changes will affect the service deployment, implement them appropriately, then monitor if the changes have the intended effect. Release management can be grouped with change management or treated as a separate process.

Asset management .Services require software and hardware assets to function. These assets should be tracked, updated appropriately and mapped to show how they interact. Configuration management, capacity management and asset management deal with these concerns and can be blended or separate processes.

Project management. IT services transition between various stages of the lifecycle at different times and different speeds. Project management skills enable IT organizations to maintain orderly services and avoid problems such as outdated systems or shadow IT.

Knowledge management. Knowledge management crosses into the other ITSM processes, and is a way to avoid duplicated work and discovery by organizing and making available information about IT services.

Incident management. When an IT service is disrupted by performance issues or an outage, the IT service desk must address the issue, restore service availability and make improvements and codify procedures to prevent reoccurrence.

Problem management. A problem is the root cause of an incident. An IT organization might remediate an incident but not fix the problem, leading to future incidents. Therefore, problem management is a way to permanently fix issues to improve service delivery and performance.

ITSM software and tools

ITSM's various processes and functions demand the use of a range of tools. ITSM software manages the workflow of service delivery, and can enable communication between customers and providers. This category includes process orchestration, help desk and service desk tools. Examples of ITSM tools include Axios Systems' assyst, ServiceNow, and BMC Remedy.

Other systems management tools aid ITSM processes. These tool categories include configuration management database (CMDB), asset management, license management, application performance monitoring (APM) and log analytics software