What Does A Service Desk Analyst Do

What is IT service management (ITSM)?
What is ITIL?
ITSM cardinal practices and concepts
ITSM benefits
ITSM tools and software
ITSM and artificial intelligence (AIOps)
ITSM instance studies
The hereafter of ITSM
ITSM and IBM Deject

IT service management (ITSM)

ITSM is how an organization ensures its IT services work the way users and the business concern need them to work.

What is IT service management (ITSM)?

IT service management (ITSM) is a fix of policies and practices for implementing, delivering and managing It services for end users in a manner that meets the stated needs of end users and the stated goals of the business organisation.

For this definition, cease users can include employees, customers or business organisation partners. Information technology services can include any hardware, software or computing resource the system supplies for a user—everything from a company notebook, software asset or Web awarding to a mobile app, cloud storage solution or virtual server for development or other services.

ITSM is a complicated discipline—afterwards all, its intended goal is to enable and maintain optimal deployment, operation and management of every single IT resource for every user in the extended enterprise. This commodity is written to provide a basic understanding of the topic.

What is ITIL?

The Data Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the virtually widely adopted best-practices guidance framework for implementing and documenting ITSM. It is an actual library; the latest version, ITIL 4, includes v volumes that cover 34 ITSM practices (up from 26 in ITIL 3). The ITIL framework is described in the volumes listed below:

Service Strategy, which focuses on the full ITSM processes lifecycle—designing, developing, implementing and managing a portfolio of IT services, plus determining the price and budget for these services and forecasting future demand for services.
Service Pattern, which covers designing services and processes with respect to concern requirements for availability, security, service level agreements (SLAs) with users, continuity (including backup and disaster recovery services) and much more than.
Service Transition, which describes best practices for moving to a new or changed service with minimal touch on on service quality and performance.
Service Operation, which outlines the everyday, basics-and-bolts direction of deployed services, including fulfilling service requests (from users or departments), responding to problems and incidents and controlling access to services.
Continual Service Improvement,which covers the steps for revising or expanding services as business needs change.

ITIL is exhaustive, just an organization'due south ITSM program does not need to implement it exhaustively—the organization tin selection and choose only the ITIL processes and practices they demand.

Other best-practice ITSM frameworks exist; some are closely related to ITIL, and many are used in concert with ITIL. These include the post-obit:

BiSL (Business Information Services Library), which is focused on ITSM from the perspective of users (this is often called the "demand" perspective).
COBIT (Control Objectives for Data and Related Technologies), which focuses on controls and governance.
ISO/IEC 20000, the offset international standard for service management.
MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework), an alternative to ITIL.
Vi Sigma, a gear up of tools for governing Information technology organizations, manufacturing and other processes, with the goal of achieving statistically high product quality levels.

ITSM key practices and concepts

Nosotros tin't review all 34 ITSM practices in a single article, but nosotros tin can cover the cadre practices that organizations adopt well-nigh often:

Incident management: In ITSM-speak, an incident is an unplanned outage or interruption in service. Incident management defines the process of responding to an incident with the goal of restoring the service with minimal touch to users and the business.
Problem management: This is the process of not just identifying and addressing the root crusade of an incident, but also the factors leading to the root crusade and determining the best mode to eliminate it.
Change management: In IT, change is constant. Change management, also known as change enablement, is the establishment of processes and practices that minimize It service disruptions, compliance bug and other risks that might result from changes made to disquisitional systems.
Nugget and configuration management: This defines processes for authorizing, monitoring and documenting the configuration of software and hardware assets (physical and virtual servers, operating systems, notebooks, mobile devices) used to deliver services. A fundamental asset and configuration direction tool is the configuration direction database (CMDB), which serves as a cardinal repository of all IT assets and the relationships between them.
Service request management: This is concerned with processes for handling requests for new services from individual users or areas of the business. This could include anything from employee requests for new notebooks to partner requests for portal access or a departmental request for several new "seats" on a software-every bit-a-service (SaaS) application. The greater the automation of the ticketing workflow and "self-service" capability in service asking management, the greater the potential benefit to the arrangement.
Service itemize: A menu or portal that allows users to assistance themselves to It services.
Knowledge management: The practice of generating and sharing IT service–related knowledge across the organisation and/or the extended enterprise (including customers and partners). A searchable, continually updated self-service knowledge base is commonly the cadre tool of this practice.
Service level management: The do of agreeing upon required or desired levels of service for different groups of users and so meeting those levels, or "compensating" users when the levels aren't met. Typically, the agreed-upon service levels are documented in a service level agreement (SLA), which essentially functions as a contract between IT and the users or the business.
It Service Desk-bound: In ITSM, the Information technology Service Desk is a superset of the standard help desk—information technology serves as the single bespeak of contact (SPOC) for fielding and managing all incidents, problems and requests. It'due south besides a foundation of ITSM, where all incident reports, trouble reports and service requests brainstorm, and where users can track their progress. The Service Desk handles software licensing, service providers and third-party contracts related to ITSM. In many cases, the Service Desk operates and maintains ITSM-related self-service portals and noesis bases.

ITSM benefits

The goal of ITSM is to ensure that IT services perform in a manner that meets the needs of the users and the business. It's no surprise, so, that a rigorous ITSM approach ofttimes results in some significant business benefits:

ITSM makes it easier for It teams to provide a fast, active, trauma-gratuitous response to unexpected events, new opportunities and competitive threats.
By enabling amend system performance, greater availability and fewer service interruptions, ITSM helps users do more piece of work and the business do more business organisation.
By systematically speeding incident resolution, reducing incidents and problems and even automatically preventing or resolving issues, ITSM helps the business organisation get more productivity from IT infrastructure at less cost.
ITSM helps the organisation ready and meet realistic expectations for service, leading to greater transparency and improved user satisfaction.
By embedding compliance into IT service pattern, delivery and management, ITSM can improve compliance and reduce hazard.

For Information technology departments, ITSM enables a continually more productive, effective and cost-effective service organization that'south aligned with business strategy—an IT department that increasingly becomes a disquisitional part of the organisation'due south success (and less and less the source of the organisation's problems).

ITSM tools and software

There are over 150 ITSM software tools on the market place at this writing, designed to assistance organizations implement and fifty-fifty automate ITSM inside the all-time-practices framework or frameworks of their pick.

The following is a very short listing of criteria for choosing a tool:

Brand sure it supports a robust IT service desk considering the service desk will serve as the interface between your IT staff and users/business organisation units.
Cull a tool with capabilities that map to every framework practice area you use or will use, including It asset management, change management, noesis management, integration of the service catalog, incident management and problem management.
Cull a tool that integrates with the other tools in your Information technology environments, such as project tracking software, collaboration tools and ERP systems.
Look for easy-to-implement tools with graphical dashboards and configurable metrics and reports to assist monitor service commitment and quality in real fourth dimension, based on key performance indicators (KPIs) like ticket volume trends, incident response and resolution times, and service level compliance statistics.

Nigh chiefly, any tool you choose should be able to handle quickly changing environments. In other words, if your tools were built to handle environments that change in one case daily, they aren't modern enough. Modernistic tools should be able to identify, analyze, prepare and verify problems in virtually real time.

ITSM and bogus intelligence (AIOps)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming part of many concern processes, and ITSM is no exception. A contempo Gartner survey (link resides exterior IBM) notes that the number of enterprises implementing AI has grown 270 percent in the past iv years; more than half of these companies are likewise considering or applying some grade of AI for ITSM.

Over time, Gartner expects more ITSM tools to contain what it calls AI for It Operations, or AIOps, which it defines as the awarding of machine learning across the unabridged operational environs. This includes monitoring and ITSM. Past applying AI to data from multiple sources, AIOps is expected to help better predict outages, prioritize events and improve root cause analysis.

Find out more virtually AIOps solutions from IBM.

ITSM case studies

The following are 3 cases in which ITSM solutions delivered value for companies:

By automating knowledge management, Cognizant's Applications Value Heart reduced aid desk-bound ticket volumes past up to 80 percentage and cut the mean time to resolve incident tickets past virtually 40 percent.
Serima Consulting GmbH helped develop a smart power filigree management solution as office of Federal republic of germany'due south politically supervised shift from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Serima's ITSM solution enables a single- service management point of view across the entire grid infrastructure and serves as a "lighthouse" project that will guide like smart grid projects throughout Frg.
St Vincent'due south Health (01:27) in Sydney, Australia, implemented an ITSM solution that allows medical staff to initiate incidents on their mobile devices and enables the hospital to resolve more than 50 per centum of its tickets on the first call.

The future of ITSM

ITSM solutions continue to change as the needs and technologies of the organizations that use them evolve. In the next few years, you're likely to see the following:

Support for the Internet of Things (IoT): IoT-connected devices are condign more pop and varied—hardware and network infrastructure, electrical fixtures and even delivery vehicles are all existence connected. These devices continually collect valuable data, including operating status, location and movements. ITSM solutions will have to start monitoring and using that data to improve problem-solving and business organization decisions. By incorporating the information you receive from your internet-connected sensors, you can gain even greater insight into your concern.
Social media integration: ITSM tools are beginning to adapt communication channels to the user, rather than the user to the tool. This means adopting social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Instagram and SMS messages as ways to log tickets and track support. With social media integration, your visitor volition be better able to gauge client sentiment.

ITSM and IBM Cloud

IBM tin help gear up you for the future of ITSM with automation tools to back up every aspect—implementation, delivery and management.

Any moves toward business-wide and IT-wide automation should start with small, measurably successful projects, which you can then scale and optimize for other processes and in other parts of your organization.

Working with IBM, y'all'll have access to AI-powered automation capabilities, including prebuilt workflows, to brand every Information technology services procedure more intelligent, freeing upwardly teams to focus on the about important IT problems and advance innovation.

Take the adjacent step:

The IBM ITSM portfolio includes IBM Control Desk for best practise-based service desk capabilities and IBM Workload Automation to automate complex workloads.
Explore IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, which includes key ITSM capabilities, such as integrated application performance management and analysis to assistance businesses correlate data across the toolchain, place and resolve incidents faster, and automate with confidence.
Acquire more than about our It direction solutions to make up one's mind which tools can assist your team to meet user expectations and business goals, today and in the futurity.
Register to download the Gartner report and discover how to future-proof your It operations with AI.
Download the IBM Cloud infographic (PDF, 464 KB) that shows the benefits of AI-powered automation for Information technology operations.

Become started with an IBM Cloud account today.