What is IT Service Management?

Since the late 1970's, organisations throughout the world have become increasingly dependent upon Information Technology as a resource for achieving the corporate business objectives. It has long been recognised that lengthy outages of these resources has a serious effect on the success of the company, and therefore it is essential these resources are protected in such a way to ensure that maximum availability is accomplished.

IT system failure is usually the consequence of defective hardware, software or procedures. To reduce the risk of failure to the corporate IT systems and services (and hence the resultant impacts upon organisational objectives) it is essential that predictable sets of results occur when changes are made.

ITSM is the overall methodology that links the essential management processes that are necessary to ensure the consistent supply of quality IT services. It originates from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) that was created in the late 1980's by the British and Dutch governments when it was discovered that no standards existed for IT management. The result has been that ITIL is becoming increasingly recognised as being the world 'standard' in best practice for managing IT infrastructure. ITSM goes one step further and links the ITIL processes directly to the service needs and expectations of the IT service consumer.

ITSM aligns the IT infrastructure and service delivery mechanisms with the business needs of the organisation to ensure the service expectations continue to be delivered in a cost-effective and practical way that is also reliable and predictable.

ITSM is the management methodology by which the IT service expectation is translated into actual delivery. This provides the organisation with the confidence that it is consistently able to meet its business objectives using its IT resources and infrastructure. The IT environment is protected from unscheduled service disruption through improved communication and operating disciplines. At the same time, the organisation benefits from having a flexible IT service that can rapidly deploy new features and facilities in a tried and proven way.

ITSM consists of five major modules that follow a common direction for implementation. This is a recurring process as changes to the business needs are reflected in the service delivery definitions.

ITSM joins the independent processes and management disciplines into a single suite of integrated and interconnected modules, as shown in the diagram below: