ITIL service management
The IT Service Management approach assumes that at the core of any IT service organization is meeting the needs of the business and users. The requirements of customers and internal clients play a major role. As a result, according to this concept, technology takes second place and becomes the means by which IT provides value to the business.
As part of ITSM approach the ITIL 4 books library – IT Infrastructure Library – was created. It is a series of books, in which processes for IT service management are collected and described.
Not all giant companies are capable of implementing each of these processes, and often there is no need to do so. However, automating basic processes is useful for any business.
Businesses are used to working with resources: there is equipment and they can use it to produce products. For example, there is a resource – a plumber – and he repairs taps. The intended use of the resource is quite clear: the business knows how much time and money it takes for the plumber to fix the faucet. No surprises there.
What is ITIL Service Management?
But if you apply the resource approach to IT or infrastructure in general, the result is too opaque. Why in some cases, a resource such as a corporate email system, is restored in 5 minutes, and in others only after 2 days of waiting and buying a new server? Are the problems really that different or did the IT contractor simply decide to take a rest, having absorbed the additional budget?
We slightly exaggerated the situation to make the basic idea more transparent: in a resource-based approach, the contractor or contractor "inside", of course, maintains the existing resources (IT systems, infrastructure, etc.), but there are no ways to optimize labor and financial costs for it. It is impossible to give answers to different strategic questions, for example, what will change in the company and the department supporting our work, if we add another system, for example, introduce some kind of automation? Will we have to hire new employees and increase funding, or will the staff get out of their personal lives and handle the new tasks?
ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) is a way to answer these questions. It is the ideology of managing IT as a set of services.
Under this ideology, a service provider (for example, IT or operations department inside a company) or service company-outsourcer provides customer some services with measurable characteristics, such as maintaining the efficiency of corporate e-mail system with the opening of new mailboxes, adjustment of anti-spam filter or provides continuous operation of transport monitoring system. And all parameters of this service are spelled out in a special agreement – SLA, which both parties involved – IT and business.