What is IT service management?
5 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Describe what IT service management (ITSM) is
- Describe the main benefits of using ITSM
- Explain the guiding principles of ITSM
Explore IT service management
ITSM, or information technology service management, is how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to their customers.
IT service management goes beyond basic IT support. ITSM teams oversee all kinds of workplace technologies, including laptops, servers, business-critical software applications, and Cloud services.
ITSM includes all the processes and activities for designing, creating, delivering, and supporting IT services. A service is something that IT provides to users or supports for a business.
Some examples of IT services are:
- Providing hardware to employees
- Granting application access
- Helping with password resets
- Maintaining desktop and laptop computers
- Managing cellphones
What are the principles of ITSM?
The core concept of ITSM is that you should deliver IT as a service. Three principles support this:
- Collect customer feedback regularly to improve service
- Establish a clear business vision
- Standardize the organization’s IT services
👇 Click the boxes below to learn more about each principle.
Let's explore an example.
Michaela, a customer, needs help from the IT team to get a new keyboard for her work computer.
- Michaela submits her request through a portal, filling out a request with all relevant information.
- The request lands in the IT team’s queue.
- The IT team sorts the incoming requests and addresses them according to importance.
- The IT team responds to Michaela’s request, asking Michaela which of the two keyboards she prefers.
- Michaela responds, selecting one of the keyboard models.
- The IT team orders the keyboard and coordinates delivery to Michaela’s work address.
- When Michaela receives the keyboard, the IT team confirms she’s satisfied.
- The IT team closes the request.
What are the benefits of ITSM?
A structured approach to service management also brings IT into alignment with business goals. This standardizes the delivery of services based on budgets, resources, and results. It reduces costs and risks, and ultimately improves the customer experience.
Here are some of the most common benefits of ITSM:
- Aligns IT teams with business priorities tracked through success metrics
- Enables cross-department collaboration
- Brings IT and development teams together through agile project management approaches
- Empowers IT teams to share knowledge and continuously improve
- Improves request coordination for more efficient service
- Promotes customer-centricity with self-service and better processes
- Reduces costs by better budget management, reduced downtime, and optimized resource utilization
- Prevents future incidents because teams respond more quickly to major incidents
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Support your ITSM team with project configurations
- Organize with work categories, portal groups, and queues
- Automate with workflow transitions, approvals, and rules
- Keep your team updated with notifications and on-call rotations