IT Service Management Solutions: Everything You Need To Know (FAQs)
What Is IT Service Management?
IT service management is a collection of policies and processes that work to support IT services throughout their full lifecycle and is how IT teams’ control and manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to their customers. IT service management solutions focus on customer needs rather than on IT systems and facilitate for continual improvement in IT processes.
IT Service Management solutions give end users the ability to easily communicate with support agents, to raise support queries and tickets, leading to improvements in the user experience and a smooth process when managing problems that arise. End users can report technical or practical issues that they require assistance with, and these solutions also help by facilitating the conversation between end users and support agents, meaning support agents can more quickly and effectively identify problems and remediate them.
Why Is IT Service Management Important?
Digital applications and services are so thoroughly interwoven into every facet of the typical user’s daily tasks and responsibilities that the need to manage these services is an increasingly important ongoing challenge for IT teams.
IT departments and employees often find it difficult to complete IT management tasks in a timely and organized manner due to the volume of work to be performed. IT service management solutions important because it can help to:
- Bring IT into alignment with the business’s goals
- Bolster staff productivity, improve operational efficiencies
- Reduce risk of security breaches
- Lead to notable efficiency and productivity gains
Organizations that make good use of IT service management solutions are more effective at coordinating the seemingly endless tasks and processes needed to maintain the expected high standards that customers value.
Since ITSM is essentially a collection of solutions, policies and processes designed to support the IT service lifecycle, it can also help to boost efficiency by ensuring nothing slips through the gaps, requiring IT teams to halt what they are doing to deal with any issues. By taking steps to ensure a more streamlined process is in place, employees may also see an increase in productivity.
Benefits of IT Service Management
Implementing a robust IT service managements solution comes with an array of benefits for organizations, including:
- More efficient, automated IT service management, eliminating time consuming manual tasks such as deploying patches
- Improved collaboration for IT teams
- Eliminate recurring issues and promote speedier issue resolution, which in turn saves time and money
- Reduce downtime and facilitating faster IT responses to outages
- Enables faster response to security issues with workflows and policies
- Increased incident visibility with detailed reports
IT service management provides the strategies and resources required to navigate even the most complex and unexpected IT issues, and then get back on track again as quickly as possible.
Features To Look For In An IT Service Management Solution
When looking to implement an IT Service Management solution every organization will have their own needs and therefore may prioritize certain features differently, but the following are some key features any good ITSM solution should offer:
Asset Management And Discovery
IT environments can be complicated, so visibility and control over all software and hardware assets is very important to ensure admins can effectively manage any alterations, configurations, provisioning, patches, and deployments, as well as licensing and any security incidents that may occur. IT service management solutions should be capable of discovering all IT assets, asset management capabilities, aiding admins in making data driven decisions by tracking incidents and devices in real time. The best solutions will allow for remote support and automated configuration management.
Read our guide to the top cyber-asset attack surface management solutions.
Configuration Management
Endpoint configurations need to adhere to the requirements of various users and should follow organizational policies. Hardware and software assets may be subject to sudden changes in complex IT infrastructure environments, so accurate and regularly updated information on all configuration items should be maintained to help manage these changes. Strong IT service management solutions are capable of enriching the ecosystem workflow by providing configuration management database (CMDB) capabilities that keep track of IT assets and their dependencies across multi-cloud environments. There is a notable reduction in risks associated with IT changes like cost overruns and downtime when you automate these processes.
Read our guide to the top network automation solutions.
Incident Management
IT service management solutions will typically offer proactive, unified, and automated incident response capabilities to help prevent any issues that occur from escalating and impacting end-users. More advanced solutions may also include machine-learning capabilities to sort through log metrics and event data, identify patterns of anomalous behavior, and take note of the cause of these problems so they can be resolved. The best ITSM solutions work to support IT in accurately predicting future problems so that preventative measures can be taken before issues have a chance to cause any really significant disruptions.
Read our guide to the top security incident response solutions.
Self-Service Help Desk
Many IT service management solutions provide an intuitive self-service support desk portal for end users, so they can be easily directed to their desired solutions, giving them control and supporting them in solving issues they encounter without always requiring the help of IT departments. Self-service functionality improves efficiency and reduces the burden on IT operations. It is vital to provide these capabilities to end-users while ensuring security and policy compliance is not compromised.
Metrics, Analytics, Reporting
A good IT service management solution should offer detailed metrics and KPI reporting to provide admins with intuitive and actionable knowledge of the IT environment which can be demonstrated to key stakeholders. The best will provide dashboards using templates and with the option of configuring advanced customizations, allowing for more streamlined analytics, and reporting capable of answering key business questions to that IT service delivering can be continually improved.
