What is ITSM (IT Service Management)?
IT service management is a set of processes and functions that help to align IT with organisational goals and deliver value. Sometimes referred to now simply as service management, ITSM focuses on delivering services that have a focus on the end user and that have an adequate amount of utility (fitness for purpose) and warranty (fitness for use).
IT service management is about more than ITIL. While ITIL does provide a basis for IT service management, the development of an international standard for IT Service Management, ISO/IEC 20000, has been crucial to the long term take up of IT service management around the world.
View the collection of ISO/IEC 20000 standards >>
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ITSM Books
For those new to ITSM, we recommend the following books:
- ISO/IEC 20000: A Pocket Guide provides an overview of the standard for anyone new to ISO 20000. It explains qualification programs, registration schemes and the interrelationship of ISO 20000 with other standards, such as ISO 27001. The overall emphasis of the guide is on ISO 20000's customer-driven approach to ensure your IT service management processes align with the needs of your business.
- Implementing Service Quality based on ISO/IEC 20000 offers practical advice and recommendations on how to prepare for audit and implementation, making your registration journey as smooth as possible.
- Ten Steps to ITSM Success provides a detailed and practical guide to implementing ITSM best practices in an organization, based on the authors' real-world experiences.
- Practical IT Service Management explains how to set up a technical service management structure, using the best practice framework established by the latest version of ITIL®.
- The Definitive Guide to IT Service Metrics provides comprehensive, current guidance on how best to tackle the critical subject of continuous improvement, a cornerstone of effective IT service management that is fundamentally dependent on gathering and using meaningful measurements (metrics).
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Integrated Measurement - KPIs and Metrics for ITSM provides a fictional account of the implementation of a KPI management system to improve an ITSM. Through the central character, readers learn from real-world conversations and situations that are commonplace in everyday business. Although the characters are fictional, the story comes from the author's own experience and real accounts from leading ITSM practitioners.
ITSM Toolkits
IT service management toolkits provide practitioners and IT professionals with proven methodologies and tools that will enable them to accelerate their IT service management projects.
Discover our ITSM, ITIL® & ISO 20000 Toolkit by IT service management experts Shirley Lacy and Jenny Dugmore to help you in whatever stage you are at with your project.
View the ITSM, ITIL® & ISO 20000 Toolkit >>
ISO/IEC 20000
ISO/IEC 20000 is the international service management standard. ISO 20000 enables organizations to ensure that their IT service management processes are aligned with business needs and international best practice.
We recommend the following ISO 20000 titles:
Learm more about ISO 20000 >>
Service Level Agreements
Service level agreements (or SLAs) are at the heart of IT service management and are used to describe agreed levels of service between a service provider and a customer. These are applicable both inside and outside an organisation.
Read more on our designated SLA page >>
Capability Maturity Models
The concept of a capability maturity model (CMM) is common to most IT service management frameworks. Understanding how a CMM approach works is fundamental to any long-term service improvement strategy. A framework that makes use of capability maturity models is COBIT.
Learn more about COBIT >>