IT service management (ITSM) is a critical component of organizational growth because it centralizes technology resources, issues, and improvements in one system. By allowing IT teams to more easily track all technological assets, it also helps organizations save money and avoid IT sprawl.
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What Is IT Service Management?
IT service management is an organization’s entire information technology asset, incident, and ticket infrastructure. It is specifically designed for IT teams to help employees use company technology effectively and securely. Through IT service management, information technology administrators control software updates to devices, monitor security systems, and receive requests for help from other employees.
IT personnel are responsible for deploying and managing ITSM solutions. Typically, software-based ITSM offers a single management console on a web, desktop, or mobile application. From this location, IT professionals can view devices, help desk requests, and security vulnerabilities in company systems.
What Are Components of IT Service Management?
Typical features of an IT service management platform include:
- Asset management: IT assets include on-premises desktop computers, laptops and other portable devices, and personal devices that use downloaded company software. Any servers and mainframes within a company data center are also considered IT assets. Asset management in ITSM is the protection and maintenance of all company hardware, including device location tracking and immediate vulnerability patching.
- Change management: IT service management encompasses all changes that happen within an organization’s IT infrastructure, including handling and approving change requests for systems, devices, or software.
- Incident management: Incidents include any IT threats or unexpected problems, such as security breaches, device loss, or network outage. Management involves correcting vulnerabilities, rectifying situations with lost hardware, and ensuring that IT team members are prepared to solve incidents.
- Configuration management: Configuration management databases store records of all configuration items, which are features of IT infrastructure that need to be configured.
- Help desk: IT support tickets and teams’ responses to them can be critical to maintaining company operations. For all businesses that operate largely through the internet, a functional IT service desk can save money that would otherwise be lost through technological failures.
Also read: How to Create an Incident Response Plan
Benefits of IT Service Management
Visibility of assets and asset data
IT teams can track all company devices from one portal with IT service management. In ITSM software, the management console shows each device registered by the organization. In some cases, ITSM tools get more granular and show configuration and operating system data for individual devices. This allows IT admins to know device ages and current statuses.
Single help desk portal
IT teams and employees have access to a central help desk for IT tickets. Service desk functionality allows IT personnel to manage all requests within the organization, track their progress, and store data about each incident within one system. Service desks benefit non-IT team members as well, giving them a single source to send all IT requests and receive feedback. They’re able to simply fill out fields on a form and submit it to the IT team.
Automation
Examples of automation in IT service management include scheduled software patches and updates, automatic queuing of tickets based on status, and triggered alerts for IT staff based on incidents. Automation reduces the amount of manual work that IT admins have to perform.
Visualization
Some ITSM tools include visualization features with dashboards for IT reporting. IT admins can present these reports to company executives for greater business intelligence (BI) needs or use them to gauge current IT metrics.
Best ITSM Tools
Freshservice
An ITSM solution that works particularly well for small businesses, Freshservice features change and release management, with data from configuration management databases and ITIL incident management. Its integration with Freshrelease, a project management app, allows users to make IT help desk tickets into projects. If your IT team needs ample time to test the solution before committing, Freshservice offers a 21-day free trial.
Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management allows IT teams to manage service level agreements (SLAs) and to track and discover company assets. IT teams are also able to design automated escalation rules for tickets.
Consider Jira if your IT team is larger and more experienced or wants to spend more time customizing the solution to enterprise-specific needs. Also, if your business is searching for a solution with powerful help desk ticketing, Jira may be the ideal platform.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a cloud-based ITSM solution that gives IT agents an individual workspace to manage all their requests. ServiceNow also offers a native mobile application, NowMobile, which provides customers with out-of-the-box workflows and low-code mobile development tools. ServiceNow is a good choice for larger organizations that are able to take advantage of features like vendor management on the more expensive ITSM Pro plan.
SysAid
SysAid is a flexible ITSM solution that works for all sizes of companies, including small businesses. If your business is a larger enterprise, SysAid offers business intelligence and analytics features along with a Business Value dashboard. If customer support is your priority, consider SysAid—its customer service team receives high ratings and praise from clients.
Considering an ITSM solution? Read Best ITSM Tools and Software for Every Need next.
