IT Service Management (ITSM)

What is IT Service Management (ITSM)?

“ Today, many companies and public institutions, strategic companies and institutions need Information Technologies (IT) to achieve their vision/goals.“

IT Service Management-ITSM

Today, many companies and public institutions, strategic companies and institutions need Information Technologies (IT) to achieve their vision/goals. In this context, organizations generally use their IT capabilities to perform the following functions:

To personally fulfill or support the main function areas of the organization,
To communicate between the working units of the organization,
Making revolutionary changes/improvements in the organization's business methods,
Increasing the productivity and efficiency of the organization, improving business processes and increasing cost/operation efficiency.

An organization's IT quality reflects the reliability of its IT units and has a direct impact on the organization's operational effectiveness. The cost of IT investments is always significant and resources are always limited. Getting the best value from IT investments is essential, but often this is not possible. For an IT organization and associated investments to deliver the expected benefits, the resulting IT service must be well planned, well designed, well managed, and well deployed. This is the IT service management application in its most basic form.

The definition of IT service management is defined by ITIL, one of the leading international methodologies in this field, as follows:

IT service management is a concept that enables an organization to maximize the value(s) it generates using information technology.

A good IT service management is necessary for the services expected from the IT unit to be delivered with the expected quality and within the specified budget. Without good IT service management, IT projects fail at the project stage or are completed over the planned budget, the services offered are not cost-effective and cannot be delivered at the expected quality, as a result; It is a common situation globally that organizations do not get the benefits they expect from their IT units.

ITIL: Global Best IT Management Methodology

ITIL (Information Technologies Infrastructure Library) is an acronym formed from the initials of the words. It is called the Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure Library. ITIL Service Management Methodology was developed and continues to be developed to produce and manage IT services at the best and uninterrupted level, and to guide IT employees and managers.

ITIL is not a turnkey solution for organizations, it must be adapted and internalized according to the needs of the organization. How to adapt the ITIL service management methodology is determined in accordance with the culture, structure and strategic goals of the implementing organization. The ITIL Methodology, which is widely used globally, has become frequently used in daily life with the ISO 20000 IT Service Management Standard. ITIL Methodology, which enables organizations to realize the importance of IT services provided by organizations for the producer and the values they provide for users, and to make them measurable, is rapidly expanding its field of application in our country as well.

ITIL Methodology has continued to be developed by leading IT companies and people globally, from its first version created in 1989 in the light of developments in the IT world. The latest version with the name ITIL 4 started to be published in 2019.

Benefits of Adopting ITIL

To support the objectives of the institution at the maximum level by identifying IT services that are more compatible with the main function areas, priorities and strategic goals of the institution,
Determining predictable and manageable IT costs, determining annual and long-term IT budget figures more reliably and making more reliable inputs to the organization's budget planning activities,
Contributing to the better functioning of the main functions of the institution, increasing productivity and efficiency by enabling IT services to be provided more uninterruptedly and with high quality,
More effective change management, contributing to the organization's adaptation to organizational and/or functional change,
To increase user satisfaction for IT services of personnel using IT services.

The contributions of these advantages in our daily lives as informatics personnel can be practically exemplified as follows:

Increasing the success of service release by coordinating the time and method of putting new and updated IT services into service with all relevant stakeholders, including users, in terms of risks and impacts,
By keeping IT problems and problems under control, instead of constantly working on problems and problems by IT personnel, by focusing on the development of the system and examining the problem areas, contributing to the identification of root causes and reducing the problems that arise,
By having an up-to-date service catalog, users have up-to-date and sufficient information about the services produced by the IT units, thereby reducing the intensity of the first level IT support units,
By enabling an up-to-date and manageable IT configuration structure and management of IT assets;
- To enable the negative effects of the changes to be minimized,
- To enable the negative effects of the changes to be minimized,
To ensure the management and preservation of corporate information with information management,
To enable the services offered by IT for users to be communicated to the user in the most appropriate way for the purposes of the institution, to request the services, to record and manage the requested services and to meet the requests within the determined performance criteria,
To record and measure all activities carried out as IT units, thus enabling the performance of the system and the organization to be determined.

Çetin Gökkaya

IT Service Management (ITSM)