IT Service Management (ITSM) connects the world of business with the world of technology. In ITSM For Beginners, ClydeBank Media tracks the modern developments in information technology that sparked the need and inspiration for ITSM.
The ITSM methodology makes the IT department a service provider for other parts of the organization. It ceases to be an auxiliary element responsible for maintaining the health of the IT infrastructure: individual servers, networks and applications.
The company formalizes the services it wants to receive from the IT department and moves to work on a customer-supplier model. As a result, the business begins to present its requirements for services, formulating the problems and tasks that users face. And the IT department itself decides with what technical means to meet these needs.
In general, the company's infrastructure is divided into separate services that automate certain business tasks. To manage these services, specialized software platforms are used. The most famous in the ITSM market is the ServiceNow cloud system. For several years in a row, it has been at the top of the Gartner Quadrant.
Asset management (ITAM, IT Asset Management). This is the process that is responsible for accounting for IT assets throughout their entire life cycle, from acquisition or development to disposal. In this case, IT assets include all sorts of software and hardware: PCs, laptops, servers, office equipment, Internet resources. Automation of asset management allows a company to more efficiently use resources and predict needs.
Two ServiceNow applications - Discovery and Mapping Service - can help with this task. The former automatically finds and identifies new assets (for example, servers connected to the corporate network) and enters information about them into a special database (called the CMDB).
Second, it defines the relationship between services and the infrastructure elements on which these services are built. As a result, all processes in the IT department and the company become more transparent.
We talked about how to implement asset management and work with these two applications in the corporate blog - there is a detailed practical guide (one and two). In it, we covered all stages of implementation: from planning to audit.
It is a process of which the optimization of IT services from an economic point of view is a part. The IT department and organization need to collect financial information to understand the big picture of costs and revenues.
The ServiceNow Financial Management module can help with the collection of this information. It is a single dashboard where IT department employees can plan budgets, keep track of costs for various activities, and issue invoices for services (both to other departments of the organization and to its customers). You can see what it looks like in our review of the ServiceNow Financial Management tool. We have also prepared a short guide to the implementation of financial management processes - in it we analyze the main stages.
The purpose of this process is to monitor IT infrastructure components and load balancing. The IT department needs to understand how changes in the performance of a server or network switch will affect the quality of the service provided.
The ServiceWatch service portal can help with this task. It collects information about the infrastructure using the already mentioned Discovery module and automatically builds dependencies between business services and IT services. We described how to collect data about IT systems using Discovery in our corporate blog. We even prepared a video on the topic.
Such portals give users the opportunity to independently solve their problems with software or hardware without resorting to the help of technical support specialists. There are several options for building such portals - static knowledge bases, FAQ or dynamic pages with the ability to accept applications.
