Why Service Management Tools are important for your business departments.

Why Service Management Tools are important for your business departments.

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IT Service Management (ITSM).
ITSM is integration of set of policies, process & procedures to manage IT services. ITSM helps business to have a strong hold on managing the entire cycle of IT Services from implementation, improvement to customer focused IT Services.

ITSM helps business to have a strong hold on multiple IT management frameworks that can be applied to both centralized and de-centralised systems. ITSM can be applied to general IT management frameworks and also to unique industries like healthcare, government or technology which have unique specified IT requirements. ITSM changes organizations to deliver value based services to customers than just being technology management services companies.

What does ITSM do for your business?
ITSM offers various frameworks for businesses to create management standards around IT services and customer service practices. It encompasses quality management, software engineering, change management, information security management as well as popular management framework standards like ISO 9000, ITIL® and ISO/IEC 20000.

It isn’t so much what ITSM can do, but what businesses can do with the frameworks that live within the ITSM discipline. They are designed to bring organization and structure to service-oriented IT departments, aligning IT goals with business needs and goals. It’s used as a guide to help businesses effectively align IT goals and business goals, especially for companies that are customer-focused. If your company has already embraced change management, you’re already on the path to building an ITSM environment – it’s all about improvement and growth in processes, services, products and software.

ITSM service desk

One primary practice that falls under ITSM is the service desk, which is defined in the ITIL® manual. ITIL® views service desks as a Single Point of Contact (SPOC), which can streamline communication within an organization or business unit. Service desks act as a hub for users and customers to contact well-trained staff to manage issues in an organized and coordinated manner.

The service desk is viewed as a primary IT function in ITSM to provide a SPOC to accommodate and manage users, IT staff, customers and IT objectives. An IT service desk, call center or help desk is the central hub for incident tickets, service requests, questions, internal issues, client and customer service and more. As such, it’s importance is heavily emphasized in the ITSM discipline as well as the ITIL® framework.

ITSM Processes

Information Technology comes with processes that are specific to technology, ITSM seamlessly integrates them with business objectives & goals, ITSM changes the focus from IT-specific to value based services.

Process Focus: shifting IT from focusing on technology to thinking about processes on a business-level
Prevention: viewed as “firefighting” in IT, but addressed as preventative on the business side
Proactive: shifting IT practices to a proactive, rather than reactive, strategy
Customers: viewing users as customers
Distributed, sourced: changing from traditional centralized IT with everything completed in-house
Integrated, enterprise-wide: shifting from a siloed IT department to a department with less isolation
Repeatable, accountable: creating structure instead of “ad hoc” practices by standardizing processes
Formal best practices: establishing processes rather than working off informal policies so everyone is on the same page
Business perspective: moving away from thinking about IT-specific needs to full-scale business needs
Service orientation: shifting from traditional “operational specific” IT initiatives to a focus on customer and client service
Some of the popular ITSM frameworks:

ITIL® 4: a framework of best practices for delivering IT services
Business Process Framework (eTOM): a framework designed for telecommunications service providers
COBIT (Control Objectives for information and Related Technologies): an IT governance framework
FitSM: a simplified, streamlined service management framework typically aligned with ISO/IEC 20000
ISO/IEC 20000: considered the international standard for IT service management and delivery
VeriSM™: is a service management approach for the digital age that helps service providers to create a flexible operating model to meet desired business outcomes
IT4IT: The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture is a standard reference architecture for managing the business of IT. It uses a value chain approach to create a model of the functions that IT performs to help organizations identify the activities that contribute to business competitiveness.
ITSM tools

You’ll find plenty of software suites that are aimed at supporting entire ITSM processes to handle ticketing, service, incidents and any upgrades, changes or problems. Typically, these suites are marketed as either ITSM or ITIL® solutions and focus on supporting IT workflow management. These ITSM software suites contain everything businesses need to work within the framework of their choice, and offer flexibility for businesses to deploy all the features they need.

There are over 100 tools that claim to support ITSM and ITIL®; only some are certified. Software vendors can gain approval from Axelos to use the trademark and an “ITIL® process compliant logo,” according to Axelos’ website, as long as the software meets the functional requirements to support ITIL.

Top ITSM tools sorted by price performance ratio, by best value for money.

  • SMARTServiceDesk.co
  • Spiceworks
  • TOPdesk
  • Zendesk.com
  • Atlassian Jira Service Desk
  • Freshworks Freshservice
  • ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
  • Cherwell Service Management
  • SolarWinds Service Desk
  • Ivanti Service Manager
  • ServiceNow.com
  • BMC Remedy
  • ITSM certification

You can earn a certification in the ITSM discipline, and there are options for corporate-level training and certification, as well as for individuals. But before you find the correct certification program, you need to know the framework you plan to use. While you can be certified in ITSM as a discipline, most programs are based on a specific framework. As all ITSM Tools are based on ITIL®, Individual ITIL® Certification are must to have. List of organization providing ITIL® trainings can be found at https://www.peoplecert.org/ways-to-get-certified/online

Few Service Management Solutions which we have evaluated and these solutions also have been Pink Verify for ITIL Compliance

  • SMART ServiceDesk.co – 11 Processes
  • IBM Control Desk – 12 Processes
  • Manage Engine – 4 Process
  • Micro Focus – 7 Processes
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