What is IT Service Management?

As companies continue to rely heavily on their technology systems to ensure smooth, successful business operations – and in particular, customer service – more and more of them are turning to ITIL as framework to adopt IT service management. Unlike traditional approaches to IT management, which focus solely on improving internal productivity and cost-efficiency, ITIL based IT service management is a methodology for managing technology infrastructures in a way that will directly, and positively, support the business needs.

Wikipedia defines IT service management as “a discipline for managing information technology (IT) systems, philosophically centered on the customer’s perspective of IT’s contribution to the business. ITSM stands in deliberate contrast to technology-centered approaches to IT management and business interaction”.

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According to SearchCIO.com, a premier research and information resource for CIOs and other management-level IT professionals, ITSM is centered around four key performance metrics:

• Growth and value – increases in income and revenue as compared to IT investments.
• Budget adherence – the ability to achieve IT goals, while staying within pre-determined spending limits.
• Risk impact – the efficient discovery, evaluation, and avoidance of IT-related threats.
• Communication effectiveness – the ability to collect and assess customer feedback to accurately determine satisfaction levels.

IT service management is a process-driven discipline that combines standardized policies and procedures with proven best practices to increase IT quality, and ensure that technology architectures are structured and administered appropriately to satisfy customer and business needs. The benefits of IT service management include:

• Creation and delivery of end-to-end services that boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability.
• Alignment of IT operations with customer needs, as well as revenue and retention goals.
• More rapid identification of problems and weak spots in IT environments, so they can be corrected before they hinder customer service and support.
• Improved insight into how certain technology solutions affect the customer experience.
• Enhanced allocation of IT resources and assets to more precisely address customer requirements.
• Smarter IT budgeting and spending.

In fact, IT service management has become so important, that it is one of the key areas highlighted within the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

In the next release of the SAManage service, scheduled for late March, we will launch a powerful new ITIL-based ITSM environment, which will include Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management.

Visit our Web site to learn more about IT service management, and how our robust on-demand IT management tools can help you better execute on your ITSM strategy.

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