What is ITSM? How is ITSM related to ITIL? And how can I ensure that my organization has the best-trained professionals in ITIL Service Management? These are very common questions that can be addressed with some straightforward answers. To start, let’s define what these related, but often-misunderstood acronyms mean.
What is ITSM?
ITSM is short form for Information Technology Service Management. IT Service Management is the universal term used to define the strategic approach for designing, delivering, managing, and improving the way IT is used within any organization.
The goal of a comprehensive IT Service Management strategy is to ensure that the right people, processes, and technologies are in place in order for the organization to meet its business goals.
- People: includes the quantitative and qualitative expertise and knowledge.
- Processes: defines an organization’s specific practices, procedures, and guidelines, including the level of complexity of them.
- Technologies: defines the logical and physical technology infrastructure comprising of hardware, software, applications, and communication networks.
In essence, ITSM encapsulates all of the activities that are performed by an organization to plan, design, and deliver the information technology services offered to their clients. There are a number of popular ITSM frameworks like Six Sigma, ISO 2000, COBIT, and ITIL.
How is ITSM related to ITIL?
ITIL refers to Information Technology Infrastructure Library, and defines the set of best practices for IT Service Management. ITIL is one of the most widely recognized and valued ITSM frameworks, and focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business. In principle, where ITSM defines the ‘what’ in managing services provided, ITIL defines the ‘how’ best to mange services provided.
The ITIL Service Management framework covers the five stages of the service lifecycle:
- The Service Strategy stage serves to understand the organization’s objectives and customer needs.
- The Service Design stage serves to turn the organization’s service strategy into an executable plan for delivering business objectives.
- The Service Transition stage serves to develop and improve the organization’s capabilities for introducing new services into supported environments.
- The Service Operation stage serves to manage the organization’s services in the supported environments.
- The Continual Service Improvement stage serves to achieve incremental and transformational service improvements for the organization.
ITSM and ITIL are both an integrated and process-based set of best practices to manage IT services. ITIL defines and documents the best practices, whereas ITSM implements those best practices to meet the unique customer needs, requirements, and priorities.
A standard ITIL Service Management implementation will cover the following key steps and activities:
- Determine current-state of existing IT infrastructure, processes, and services.
- Develop the desired future-state of IT and the services that the organization needs to provide.
- Develop a ‘roadmap’ that depicts how the organization will get to the future-state from the current-state; can be also be referred to as a ‘From-To Map’.
- Develop the tactical plan to execute on the high-level ‘roadmap’.
How can I ensure that my organization has the best-trained professionals in ITIL Service Management?
A comprehensive understanding of ITIL Service Management fundamental principles has become increasingly important to the efficiency and productivity of any organization offering IT services. Whether your organization has professionals that are new to IT services or they have been in the industry for many years, you should consider ITIL training for your organization.
Thought Rock offers online ITIL certification course designed to help managers and IT professionals meet or exceed the conditions of international service guidelines.