Service Management

What is Service Management and why do we need it?

Businesses have different missions, have different goals and reasons for operating the way they do. They need freedom to change, to grow, to develop. They want to focus on what matters most to them; sustaining and developing products or services for their chosen market.

Yet they also need the continual support and understanding from IT Services, without which no modern organization can function.

IT Services need to be structured, to be reliable, available, to cope with demanding customers and complex infrastructure, to continuously evolve and improve, and also to have the understanding of their role from the rest of the organization.

IT Services do not exist for their own sake. They exist to support the rest of the organization.

IT Service Management seeks to build and maintain this understanding between IT Services and the organisation:

• To ensure that the organisation’s business needs are underpinned by high quality, cost effective, value-adding IT Services
• To improve the quality of IT service provision
• To reduce the long term cost of service provision

IT Service Management comes in different parts, addressing different requirements for an organisation or at different levels of maturity:

ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) is a comprehensive and cohesive framework of best practice processes for IT Service Management. It has been adopted by organisations, large and small, public and private, throughout the world. It consists of a set of inter-related and complementary books which provide advice and guidance on the operation and support of quality IT services. Its focus and rationale is delivering, and improving the quality of, business-focused IT services in a cost-justified way.

ISO20000 (full name ISO/IEC 20000) is an international standard for IT service management (based largely on BS15000) and was finalised in December 2005. It specifies both mandatory and recommended elements for each of the inter-related management processes, which are based heavily upon the ITIL® framework.

COBIT® (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) is regarded as the world's leading IT control and governance framework.

The purpose of IT governance is to build and maintain structures and processes which ensure that IT is aligned with the business strategy, that risks and opportunities are properly managed and that IT delivers value for money.

The COBIT® governance framework, supporting toolset and documentation allows managers to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks.