What is ITSM?

Short answer

ITSM - Information Technology Service Management

A slightly longer answer

ITSM is an area of ​​expertise in managing IT services. There are two main initial premises accepted in ITSM: firstly, a service is the main form of providing value derived from IT, and secondly, IT services are best organized as a set of processes with clearly defined goals, objectives, roles and responsibilities.

even more complete answer under cat

Why does a company need an IT department?

Let's start from afar: with the question of why an IT department is needed in a commercial organization. For many companies, the IT department is a unit whose budget constantly leaves money, but which at the same time makes absolutely no profit. However, in modern realities, almost any business needs to use information technology: conduct electronic correspondence, go online, automate business processes both within the company and when interacting with partners and customers. The information systems arising for these purposes are very complex and require special knowledge and constant attention for their deployment and operation. Thus, there is a need for specialists who would carry out this work.

How to organize the work of the IT department?

It turns out that from the point of view of business, the IT department is an inevitable fee for doing business in the modern world. This means that the business naturally naturally wants to clearly understand what it pays for and not pay in excess of the minimum necessary. At the same time, numerous stories about the misunderstanding of business and IT are a good example of the fact that a successful way to organize the work of the IT department is far from obvious.

The historically established “traditional” approach to managing the IT department can be called “resource” or “product”. It consists in the fact that the task of the IT department is to create and support various systems that are considered by the business as resources: If you transfer them to qualified specialists, they can perform some tasks assigned to them. For example, having resources called “working computer”, “Internet” and “1C. Accounting”, an accountant will be able to prepare and submit to the annual tax report. If the resource cannot be used (for example, because “I-Internet-doesn’t open !!! 11”), you need to entrust a specialist from the IT department to understand the situation and fix the resource.

Thus, with the “traditional” approach, the IT department creates and maintains a set of resources and processes complaints from company employees who use these resources at their discretion (in accordance with the job description). At the same time, typical tasks that can be solved by the IT department should be formulated in technical terms (for example, “install another server on a 4-core Xeon with 16GB of RAM and 2TB disk storage” or “update Windows on all working computers with XP on Windows 7 ").

What else could be the approach to organizing the work of the IT department?

Now the concept of SaaS (Software as a Service) has become quite famous, which denotes a software distribution model in which the buyer does not become the owner of the software, but gets access to the functionality he needs (usually through a web interface and browser). At the same time, the buyer does not bear the burden of problems associated with installation, support and updating. Payment in this model is calculated based on the volume of services consumed by the user. For example, for each person-month of using the system. In addition to the absence of the burden of ownership of a software product, this approach has other business benefits. Namely: cost transparency and their commensurability with the volume of services received, as well as a clear (enshrined in the contract) understanding of what exactly, in what volume and at what price you can expect from the supplier.

You can try to transfer this approach from software to the work of the IT department and define the concept of “IT as a Service”. If a business is able to formalize the services that it wants to receive from the IT department (in other words, if the business has a good idea of ​​why it needs this IT department at all), then the payment model for services rendered is quite possible. This approach allows business owners to better understand what is happening in the IT department, how much it costs for the business, and why it costs that much. In addition, it provides an opportunity to constantly coordinate the activities of the IT department, ensuring that the services provided meet current requirements.

For programmers, the analogy to the principle of encapsulation from OOP can be understood. Since the features of the IT department are beyond the competence of the business, they should not be present in the interactions between business and IT. The interaction should be defined in terms that are understandable to both sides, and the way in which this or that order is carried out must be hidden inside. Hiding in this case does not mean that you need to keep the details in strict confidence and never share them with someone not from IT, but only that technical details are not involved in the description of IT services. For example, instead of the requirement that "Exchange 2007 should be on two independent clusters, and that the temperature in the server room be no higher than 20 degrees", require "98% availability of corporate mail daily from 8:00 to 20:00 and 80% availability the rest of the time ".

Actually ITSM (IT Service Management) is a field of knowledge about the management of IT services. There are two main initial premises accepted in ITSM: firstly, a service is the main form of providing value derived from IT, and secondly, IT services are best organized as a set of processes with clearly defined goals, objectives, roles and responsibilities.

Thesis

Services are the main form of providing value to customers.
Services meet the requirements of the customer.
Products created as a result of project activities or purchased on the market replenish the pool of IT service resources and are used in the future to provide services.

ITSM (IT Service Management) is a field of knowledge about the management of the IT department based on two premises:

• it will be convenient for everyone if the result of the IT department is presented as a set of IT services
• The main form of organization of the IT service

How does all this relate to practice?

First, adapting corporate IT management processes to ITSM practices has recently become fashionable. First of all, in large Western companies (retail, banks, insurance), but gradually this fashion comes to the territory of the former USSR. Secondly, the ITSM theme is well developed and reflected in the standards and frameworks (ISO / IEC 20000, ITIL, COBIT). That is, there is a common understanding of what processes are involved, and a language that allows specialists in the industry to communicate. Thus, if you intend to work in this environment, most likely you will need a general idea of ​​the topic, and the presence of certificates (for example, ITIL v3 Foundation) can help in finding a job.

I think that standards, frameworks and certificates can be written separately.