1. IT Service Management (ITSM): creating structures, achieving added value
2. What is IT Service Management?
3. What are the advantages of IT Service Management?
4. ITSM processes and challenges
5. An introduction to IT Service Management
6. IT Service Management tools
7. Coverage of IT services with i-doit
The CMDB
IT monitoring
Network discovery
Service desk
8. 6 steps for introducing IT Service Management
9. ITSM in practice: a new server is installed
10. IT processes as they should be – simple and efficient
11. The ITSM management disciplines and ITIL
12. What does ITIL have to do with ITSM?
13. Starting an ITSM project with i-doit
With IT Service Management (ITSM), you control your IT processes in a targeted and efficient manner. The appropriate ITSM software creates clear workflows, improves collaboration, and increases transparency. In this way, IT becomes an active support for your value creation. Learn what exactly lies behind ITSM and how your company benefits from it.
IT Service Management combines policies and processes into a structured approach for the planning, implementation, and provision of IT services. This ensures that your IT reliably meets the requirements of specialist departments and corporate goals. Defining and controlling IT services increases service quality. Thus, ITSM offers the best possible support between the IT department and business processes.
IT Service Management aligns itself with the ITIL framework. It thus relies on field-tested standards to design services and processes efficiently. This framework primarily serves the modelling of processes. What is special: ITSM adapts to your processes and not vice versa. As a rule, existing processes are optimised through the introduction of IT Service Management. And this applies across all corporate divisions.
With ITSM, you consistently align IT goals with the needs of the company and your customers. Due to the focus on continuous improvement, your IT department is transformed from an internal service provider into a strategic co-creator. It is no longer "just" a department within the company. And in this philosophy, other departments and employees become customers.
Efficient IT Service Management ensures smooth processes and increases the quality as well as availability of your services. Even in exceptional situations, your IT services remain stable and high-performing – a decisive factor for the satisfaction of customers and employees.
The advantages of ITSM at a glance:
The portfolio of IT services is constantly growing. IT departments face ever new challenges and must quickly absorb and fulfil requirements. It is often unknown which components (e.g. contracts, people, systems, service providers, etc.) the implemented services are ultimately comprised of. Through ITSM, you actively engage with the offered services.
By using monitoring and discovery tools, disruptions are detected faster. Recovery times become shorter. Business-critical processes remain operational; with an efficient ITSM system, the rectification of a disruption begins before it is even noticed by users.
Being faster and better than the competition: a goal that is often mentioned when customer satisfaction needs to increase. With IT Service Management, you improve internal and external communication. You summarise information promptly and reduce processing times for requests through standardised processes.
Through the combination of efficient tools, the implementation of IT Service Management succeeds quickly and straightforwardly.
Have you already heard of ITSM but don't really know what lies behind it? Then this whitepaper is exactly right. In this first of three parts of the ITSM series, we show you what ITSM is and what advantages it has. You will learn all the prerequisites for introducing IT Service Management.
When choosing an ITSM tool, we highly recommend a golden rule: ITSM cannot be realised with a single software. You will quickly find: combining different systems has more advantages than using a single solution.
There are many systems on the market that combine everything necessary. The advantage is clear: you manage one solution and have one point of contact when support is needed. The decisive disadvantage: you have to rely on a single manufacturer.
If there are problems in one of the components, the entire system is affected. And if one of the applications does not meet the requirements, you are forced to replace the entire system in the worst case. Requirements for IT change rapidly. It is advantageous to ensure maximum flexibility. If you realise the solution from individual systems, you gain independence and flexibility. If a component does not meet your expectations, it can be quickly replaced. The rest of the ITSM solution continues to run unimpaired.
Each individual application is optimally tailored to its area, as each manufacturer invests its entire know-how into this system. Each solution unfolds its full potential. A software solution like i-doit helps you to consolidate these tools and processes.
It is the core of the entire ITSM tool. All information regarding assets is stored in it: technical data, services, people, documents, and much more. All information is linked to one another through dependencies and relationships. All other parts of the ITSM solution access or update the data in the CMDB. Likewise, information from the CMDB can be transferred to third-party systems.
The systematic monitoring of important networks and systems in real-time is indispensable. If you detect disruptions and outages immediately via high-performance monitoring, you react quickly and ensure the availability of systems and services at all times. Ideally, you rectify disruptions even before users notice them.
Network discovery is the method of choice to initially supply IT documentation with data. All components connected to the network are automatically detected. Important information such as installed software, serial numbers, and IP addresses is delivered right with it. The manual effort for documentation is largely eliminated. Later, during ongoing operations, you will appreciate that you do not have to manually maintain information on software and used licences.
Wouldn't it be great if customer support automatically had all information regarding an incident at hand? You enjoy this advantage if you connect a CMDB to the service desk. All information regarding an IT asset is automatically read out from the CMDB and stored in the ticket. Added to this are details about previous communication, emails, fault reports, and much more. No follow-up questions, no delay. Service as customers expect and appreciate it.
The strength of the individual components of an ITSM tool lies in their integration. We will show you, using a practical example, how the individual ITSM elements work together. In doing so, we look at an excerpt from a server lifecycle.
With i-doit, you map the entire IMAC process chain. The management of a server's lifecycle is significantly simplified by the possibilities resulting from data integration. This shortens communication paths, means you only enter data once, and thus optimises IT operations.
Step 1: Basic documentation:
When you order a new server, it is included in the IT documentation. This primarily serves capacity management. You check whether subsequent orders for space, rack space, cabling, UPS, etc., might become necessary. You already document values that can be defined at this stage (IP address, rack space). Deeper technical details must be considered afterwards. Network discovery will help you with this at a later date.
Step 2: The server is delivered – what now?
When the server has been delivered, further information is available to you: data such as delivery note, supplier, invoice, start and duration of warranty can only be collected automatically to a certain extent. Take this opportunity to record everything manually into the IT documentation right away. Remember the serial number. Based on this, you carry out a mapping that will later be used by network discovery.
Step 3: Discovery provides the necessary details:
You have installed the new server in the rack and put it into operation. Now the hour of network discovery has come. During the next run of the discovery tool, the server is automatically found and its data is read. Information such as memory, hard disk capacity, operating system, and patch level now automatically flows into the documentation. An enormous amount of detailed data is available in your network. With discovery, you can transfer large parts of it into the CMDB. This simplifies IT documentation considerably.
Step 4: Monitoring in operational use:
Your new server might serve as storage for important documents. Or you have intended it for the task of an email server. In any case, its task is so significant that an outage would be critical. You must be able to detect a disruption via the fastest route. Now monitoring plays to its strengths. The data for the new server comes from the CMDB. As a result, the monitoring solution "knows" how it can address the server. The monitoring tool continuously checks whether the server is reachable. The acquired data is added to the server in the CMDB.
Step 5: The service desk:
Monitoring cannot reach the new server. This critical error is reported immediately by the system. You see the error message straight away on the CMDB dashboard. However, even more happens in the background.
A new ticket is automatically generated. This process is triggered by the monitoring. The data for the server originates from the CMDB and is added directly to the ticket. Subsequently, the ticket is assigned directly to the responsible technician. The technician now has all important information available at a glance. After a quick fix by the technician, documentation of the disruption is important. This also happens automatically with an ITSM system. The entire ticket with all information is stored directly under the server in the CMDB. Should the same disruption occur again, a technician can look at the closed ticket once more. The solution path for rectifying the disruption is immediately available.
From this example, you can see how well the seamless cooperation between the individual parts of an ITSM tool works. Information is made usable across systems. Communication between systems and the IT department becomes more efficient, and disruptions are resolved faster.
Have you dealt with the topic of ITSM and perhaps already use monitoring or a service desk as a stand-alone solution? Now you want to deploy a complete ITSM solution? We will show you how this is possible with the i-doit CMDB, what you need for it, and which solutions will lead you to success.
IT Service Management with the i-doit CMDB:
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In the 2019 version, ITIL speaks of practices. In earlier versions, processes were mentioned at this point. The incident management process thus becomes the incident management practice. ITIL 4 defines a total of 34 ITSM practices, structured into three areas: general management, service management, and technical management.
The most important practices for ITSM at a glance:
Anyone dealing with ITSM inevitably encounters the term "ITIL" – the abbreviation for "IT Infrastructure Library". It is a collection of best practices for ITSM that was already developed in Great Britain in the 1980s. Today, the current version ITIL 4 is considered the standard for implementing modern ITSM structures.
Good to know: ITSM and ITIL are not identical. ITIL is a framework with which an ITSM system can be specifically designed. But not every ITSM system is necessarily based on ITIL.
Overarching structures, known as frameworks, support you in deploying the appropriate procedures, people, and technologies. They offer a collection of values, processes, and strategies to realise IT Service Management. And alongside ITIL, numerous other models exist for this purpose:
i-doit is the foundation for your IT Service Management. If you want to know what i-doit achieves and what possibilities it offers you, simply book a personal live demo right now and get to know i-doit. Our support team will show you the functions and answer your questions regarding IT Service Management.