What is ITSM?

For those just getting started on your journey with ITSM or if you keep hearing the ITSM acronym thrown around, this post is for you!

ITSM, or Information Technology Service Management, is a set of practices and processes that organizations use to design, deliver, manage, and improve the way they provide IT services to their customers.

At its core, ITSM is about aligning IT with the needs of the business and ensuring that the IT infrastructure and resources are used effectively and efficiently. It involves establishing clear roles and responsibilities for IT staff, defining service-level agreements (SLAs) with customers, and implementing processes for managing and improving the quality of IT services.

One of the key principles of ITSM is the idea of a service lifecycle, which consists of several stages:

1. Service Strategy: This stage involves defining the overall strategy for IT services, including the goals and objectives of the service, the target audience, and the business value that the service will provide.
2. Service Design: In this stage, the design of the service is developed, including the processes, policies, and technical requirements needed to deliver the service.
3. Service Transition: This stage involves transitioning the service from the design phase to the live environment, including testing, training, and deployment.
4. Service Operation: This is the stage where the service is actually being delivered to customers. It involves monitoring the service, responding to incidents and problems, and continuously improving the service.
5. Service Improvement: In this final stage, the service is reviewed and analyzed to identify areas for improvement and to ensure that it is meeting the needs of the business and customers.

ITSM frameworks, such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), provide a set of best practices and guidelines for implementing ITSM in an organization. These frameworks can help organizations to standardize their IT processes, improve service delivery, and increase efficiency.

Overall, ITSM is an essential component of any modern business, as it helps to ensure that IT resources are used effectively and efficiently to support the needs of the organization and its customers.

The core concept of ITSM is the belief that IT should be delivered as a service. A typical ITSM scenario could involve asking for new hardware, like a laptop. You would submit your request through a portal, filling out a ticket with all relevant information, and kick off a repeatable workflow. Then, the ticket would land in the IT team’s queue, where incoming requests are sorted and addressed according to importance.

Check out how we facilitate the ITSM Strategy using Jira Service Management in this short video!