Things You Must Know About ITSM And How It Is Helpful In The Digital World

“Today data analytics is changing the world of ITSM by introducing its robust predictions of future business ventures, system crashes and providing meaningful insights.”

But, What Is IT Service Management Or ITSM?

ITSM or IT Service Management refers to creating, supporting, designing and managing quality IT services in the best possible way to meet customer needs. The customer does not need to be a technology expert for communicating with IT to meet their needs. They can also resolve simple issues like password reset and desktop tune-up for regular maintenance with the help of the self-service portals provided by companies.

What Does ITSM Do?

ITSM shows how IT teams manage and deliver end-to-end IT services to their customers. Its core belief is treating IT as a service. It coordinates the perfect mix of people, technology and processes, essentially creating a bridge between IT and the customer. 

“The above graph shows North America leading the cloud-based ITSM market in 2020-2027, owing to its many solution vendors and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies.”

 Where Is ITSM Required?

Companies create high-quality solutions by utilizing ITSM practices in the following core areas:-

• Problem Management: It includes identifying the root cause of a problem, checking the factors leading to it and finding the best solution possible. 

For example, if a system is down, problem management would determine the root cause of the malfunction and determine further measures to eliminate it. 

• Incident Management: Incident management refers to responding to an incident to restore services faster with intelligent routing and improving end-user experiences. 

For example, if a system starts malfunctioning, incident management may reboot the machine to resolve the incident, closing after service restoration.

• Asset and Configuration Management: It includes authorizing, monitoring and documenting the configuration of software and hardware assets used to deliver services. 

For example, you can build an inventory using many discovery sources by discovering assets inside and outside your home network, tracking assets' life cycle, managing software and license, and self-audit.

• Change Management: Change management enables processes that reduce service disruptions, manage change, understand incidents and reduce costs. 

Change management is used in mergers and acquisitions, introducing new technology, and changing leadership in an organization.

• Knowledge Management: It includes automatic identification of knowledge gaps. A self-service knowledge base that updates continuously is the core tool of this practice. 

An example of this system is Tableau's knowledge base which includes a search feature for users to answer solutions and articles to address customer support issues.

• Service Level Management: It provides visualizations to help users understand active SLAs, escalations and notifications to understand the organizational efforts against the commitments made to the users. It includes handling operational level agreements, contracts and regular customer views.

• Service Catalog: It provides a platform for self-service, letting users access IT solutions and aims to assist the IT service provider meet end-user expectations efficiently. 

A service catalog may contain email and calendar, permissions and access, phone, storage and backups and so on. 

• IT Service Desk: It provides a single platform for managing all incidents, software licensing, reports, third-party contracts, service requests and viewing progress. 

An IT service desk may include the following scenarios: Inquiries, Information Security and Administrative Requests.  

“The figure above shows the core areas that require ITSM. Three categories combine to form these processes- Service Strategy, Reports and Dashboard and Service management.”

Popular Tools Of ITSM

Some of the most popular ITSM tools are:-.

●  SysAid- SysAid combines all the IT essentials in one software to assist with your assets in customer self-service. It collects all guides, tips and solutions in a single knowledge base for future use.

●  Zendesk- Zendesk provides a single place for customer queries to store, manage and solve. Flexible support, advanced features and high-quality customer service make it an ideal ITSM tool.

●  SolarWinds Service Desk- SolarWinds is a multi-tenant SaaS platform. It possesses customizable service portals, powerful automation and data points suggestions using AI and machine learning.

●  ServiceNow- The features of ServiceNow include constant updates, a single source of record in the cloud, multiple applications and fast services.

Conclusion

ITSM has revolutionized the world since its introduction. ITSM manages both the technical aspects of your IT infrastructure and customer service. It improves consistency, efficiency and creates better visibility into the delivery processes of IT services, ultimately increasing business productivity. 

There is more to ITSM in terms of how data analytics is changing ITSM today. We'll soon be sharing the next blog which is a must-read to find the answer.