In this article, we delve into two of the service management approaches and their major differences: IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
What is IT Service Management (ITSM)?
IT Service Management (ITSM) is a strategic approach to deliver IT as a service. It comprises a set of workflows and tools for optimally creating, implementing, delivering, and managing IT services for customers, focusing on customer needs. The goal of ITSM is to provide processes and tools to IT teams to help them manage end to end IT services while improving business performance, increasing productivity, and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Additionally, ITSM focuses on facilitating the core IT functions of an organization, helping the business achieve its goals, while managing costs, by utilizing the IT budget maximally.
ITSM benefits businesses in the following ways:
· Supports agility and adaptability by helping to innovate faster to handle market changes.
· Better productivity and faster incident resolution.
· Pre-emptive anticipation and resolution of issues before they occur.
Improved performance across the board as a result of increased IT availability.
ITSM focuses on optimizing IT for the organization, and there are different frameworks of best practices, processes, and tools that come into play to achieve this.
ITSM Processes
Although technology plays an integral role in delivering IT services, some procedures
.
must be followed to ensure efficient IT service delivery encompassed in ITSM processes. Some of these core ITSM processes include:
· Change Management helps handle all IT infrastructure changes to provide transparency and prevent bottlenecks.
· Incident Management is concerned with responding to and resolving service issues or incidents promptly and appropriately to reduce downtime or service interruption.
· IT Asset Management involves accounting for, deploying, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of an organization’s assets in a timely manner.
· Knowledge Management creates, uses, manages, and shares the information assets of an organization to achieve business objectives.
· Problem Management assists with locating and figuring out approaches to eliminate the underlying causes of incidents to avoid repeat occurrences.
· Service Request Management is concerned with managing all IT service requests, like access requests, software and hardware upgrades.
ITSM Frameworks
ITSM frameworks are best practices and formalized guidelines that provide a systematic approach to implementing ITSM for organizations. These help organizations set their ITSM strategy while monitoring how they implement the chosen strategy.
However, a crucial thing to note is that these frameworks are not ‘rules’ to follow strictly and are open to interpretation.
There are different ITSM frameworks as below, and organizations can combine them