Efficient IT Service Management: The Key to Success - Essay Sample

Introduction

IT service management as often abbreviated as ITSM is simply the manner in which IT team players manage and control the end-to-end provision of IT services to their clients. This includes all the activities and processes to support, deliver, create, and design IT services. The fundamental concept of IT service management is the belief that IT should be provided as a service. A typical scenario of IT service management could comprise a user or an employee of an organization making an official request for new hardware like a computer or a printer. This would require the user or staff member to submit their request through a web portal, filling out a ticket with all the relevant required set of details, and kicking off a repetitive workflow. Then, this ticket would be created and passed over and lands on the IT team's queue, where new arriving requests are arranged and addressed according to their levels of urgency or importance as described by the governing principles of the specific service provider (Kenneth, 2019).

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Because of their routine day-to-day relations with information technology, people often misinterpret Information Technology Service Management as a basic function of IT support. On the contrary, IT Service Management teams supervise all types of office technology that range from servers to desktops, to printers, to laptops, to power supplies, back up stations and even to business-critical software applications (O.Oparanma & Wechie, 2014). IT service management benefits every company's IT team, and service management ideologies can increase the productivity of an entire organization. IT service management leads to productivity and efficiency gains. An organized methodology to service management also brings IT into orientation with business progressive goals, making the results, resources, and delivery of services based on budgets standardized. It decreases risks and costs, and eventually improves the overall customer experience.

There is a shared line of thought in the IT field that suggests that a good methodology to IT Service Management should follow three steps in this order:

• Implement and build IT technology.
• Adopt and apply the right process.
• People can learn the technology and abide by the process.

Application service management (ASM) is an evolving discipline within systems management that concentrates on managing and monitoring the quality and performance of business transaction service. ASM can be described as a well-designed process and application of interrelated apparatus to remedy, diagnose, detect, and document the service quality of complicated business processes to ensure that they exceed or rather meet end-users' performance measurements relate to how fast relations are finalized or information is provided to the application users by the combination of applications, hypervisors where applicable, operating systems, network interconnects, and hardware platforms. The critical machinery of ASM comprises of application discovery and mapping, application health management & measurement, incident-related triage, and transaction-level visibility.

ASM is associated with application performance management (APM) but rather serves as a more practical, top-down methodology that concentrates on the provision of business services. In strict description, ASM differs from APM in two important ways.

APM focuses completely on the execution of an occurrence of an application, disregarding the complicated set of interdependencies that may be existent behind that presentation in the data center. ASM explicitly commands that each infrastructure or application software, operating system, hardware platform, and transactional hop be separately measurable, even if that dimension is inferential. This is critical to ASM's conditions to be capable of isolating the source of service impacting circumstances.

APM usually requires the composition of the application for measurability and management. ASM believes in an application centered methodology, to assert that the application and its operating system have wide-ranging visibility of an application's dependencies, applications, whether off-machine or on-machine, as well as the underlying application operating system itself alongside the hardware platform it is operating on. Additionally, an in-context mediator can also infer system potentials with a great degree of precision, and with a smaller scale of precision when the transaction occurs between non-instrumented and instrumented platforms.

In a similar way, IT Operations Management can be described as the functions accountable for the continuing maintenance and management of an organization's IT infrastructure to ensure provision of the contracted level of IT services to a specified business organization. IT processes can be described as the set of actions involved in the day-to-day running of the IT Infrastructure for the determination of providing IT service at negotiated levels to meet the stated business purposes.

IT Operations Management Role

The main role of Operations Management is to implement the continuing procedures and activities required to maintain and manage the IT infrastructure so as to support and deliver IT service operations at the agreed levels. Operations Control, which supervises the monitoring and execution of the operational events and activities in the IT Setup (Armistead, 2010). These operations can be achieved through the support of a Network Operations Centre or an Operations Bridge. In addition to implementing routine errands from all practice areas and operations control also executes the following detailed tasks:

• Console Management, which is the process of defining central monitoring and observation capability and then applying those consoles to exercise monitoring and control activities
• Job prioritization and scheduling, or the controlling of routine scripts or batch jobs
• Restore and backup on behalf of all the application and technical management group and departments and normally on behalf of users
• Design and production management for the distribution and collation of all consolidated electronic or printing output
• Presentation of maintenance processes on behalf of Application or Technical Management teams or electronic output
• Presentation of maintenance events on behalf of Application or Technical or Management group or departments
• IT operations must achieve a balance between these roles, which will require the following:
• A complete understanding of how knowledge is used to deliver IT services
• A comprehension of the relative impact and importance of those services on the business success and productivity

Manuals and procedures that plan the roles of IT Operations in both the delivery of IT services and the management of technology.

A clearly distinguished set of measures to report to the business on the success of service intentions; and to provide reports to IT managers on the effectiveness and efficiency of IT Operations

All IT Operations staff comprehend accurately how the performance of technology affects the distribution of IT services

A cost approach that is aimed at matching the necessities of diverse business units with the cost savings obtainable through the optimization of prevailing technology or by investing in new technology

An importance, rather than price, based on the Return on Investment strategic plans.

References

Armistead, C. (2010). Service Operations Strategy: Framework for Matching the Service Operations Task and the Service Delivery System. International Journal of Service Industry Management, 1(2), 6-16. DOI: 10.1108/eum0000000002800

Kenneth, T. (2019). ITSM - What is ITSM (IT Service Management)? - ServiceNow. Retrieved 19 November 2019, from https://www.servicenow.com/products/itsm.html

O.Oparanma, D., & Wechie, I. (2014). Crisis Managemnet Processes To Ensure Effective And Continuous Performance. IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 16(8), 01-04. DOI: 10.9790/487x-16830104 (O.Oparanma & Wechie, 2014)