ITC544: IT Fundamentals Tutorial on Topic 8 (ITSM) SAMPLE SOLUTIONS

This assignment provides a detailed overview of IT Service Management (ITSM). It defines ITSM, explains its importance, and describes its benefits, including improved service quality, cost savings, and actionable insights. The tutorial covers the ITSM stages: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation, along with the Continual Service Improvement (CSI) stage. It also explores various ITSM frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, Six Sigma, and MOF, highlighting their popularity and application. The document explains the implementation of ITSM processes, emphasizing the importance of aligning them with business needs and team maturity. It briefly describes key ITSM processes like Incident Management, Problem Management, Asset Management, Change Management, and Knowledge Management. Finally, the tutorial outlines ITSM metrics and KPIs for measuring success, including service availability, time to resolve, first-call resolution rate, SLA breach rate, customer satisfaction, cost per contact, and Net Promoter Score (NPS), and concludes with a discussion on ITSM tools and their selection.

ITC544 IT Fundamentals
Tutorial on Topic 8 (ITSM) SAMPLE SOLUTIONS
1. What is ITSM Why ITSM is important?
ITSM is the acronym of IT Service Management. It means how you manage the information
systems that deliver values to your customers. IT Service Management (ITSM) includes
activities like planning and managing changes, fixing things when they go wrong or
managing the IT department annual budget. The term IT Service Management is used in a
lot of ways by different management frameworks. But some standard elements for most
definitions of ITSM include:
 Description of the processes needed to deliver and support IT Services for
customers.
 The primary aim is to deliver and support the technology or products needed by
the business to meet key organizational goals.
 Defining the roles and responsibilities of the people involved in managing
services, including IT staff, customers, and other stakeholders.
 The management of 3rd party suppliers (partners) involved in the delivery and
support of the technology, products, and services.
ITSM is important for a variety of reasons. Implementing ITSM can help regularize processes
through structured delivery and documentation. ITSM implementation also helps in saving
costs by building a predictable IT org. Implementing ITSM has business benefits by bringing
actionable IT insights to the business that help in decision making.
2. Describe the benefits of ITSM.
Although the benefits of implementing IT Service Management practices vary depending on
the organization’s needs, a few distinctive benefits of implementing ITSM include:
 Improving the quality of service.
 Maintaining a cost justifiable service quality.
 Regularize services to meet business, customer and user demands.
 Implementing the concept of integrated centralized processes.
 Making everyone aware of their roles and responsibilities within the IT
Organization.
 Learning from previous experience and improving efficiency.
 Demonstrate performance benchmarks and indicators.
 Reduce the cost of delivering IT services by lowering the wasted effort and
concentrating on getting things right the first time.
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3. Describe the ITSM stages
ITSM processes are the elements of an ITSM framework. An ITSM process supports its major
concepts and describes the way of IT service management. ITSM processes can be divided
into the following stages:
Service Strategy (SS) is the first and foremost stage in an ITSM process. The ITSM benefit of
this stage is to help determine what exactly customers are looking for, and verify whether
the service is financially workable. Service Strategy gives an overall understanding of a
company’s services in connection to the Service Portfolio, Financial Management, Business
Relationship Management, etc.
Service Description (SD) enables strategic identifications with a detailed description of
services offered by an enterprise. A key ITSM benefit from this stage is the assurance that
the IT service delivery meets the requirements, and that the organization is capable enough
capacity to deliver the services securely.
Service Transition (ST) is accountable for the auctioning of the company’s services. The
ITSM benefit of the ST stage is the maintenance of the stability of services while allowing
them to be dynamic by hosting changes judiciously. The processes at this stage are Change
Management, Release Management, Knowledge Management, etc.
Service Operation (SO) ensures that the services work without hindrance, promptly warding
off any disruptions. There are 6 main processes that help SO do that:
 Event management - Monitors and provides notifications on how the services are
running
 Incident management - Restores the normal flow of IT processes as soon as possible,
in case of disruptions
 Problem management – Caters to the underlying cause of incidents
 Request fulfilment – Deals with low-risk, recurrent and pre-defined circumstances
 Access management - Deals with accounts and passwords
 Continual Service Improvement (CSI) - Constant improvement of the services
delivered
4. What are the different ITSM frameworks? Which of them are most popular?
While there are numerous frameworks that can organize ITSM, the most prominent ITSM
framework is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). With companies
having quite a few different subsidiaries, divisions, and locations globally, it’s easy to see
how an organization can meet their different requirements by integrating several different
frameworks, processes, and standards into their ITSM stages. Other frameworks include:
COBIT – This governance framework was created by the IT Governance Institute and the
Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) and complements ITIL for IT
governance. The focus of COBIT is on the quality, control, and reliability of information
systems.
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Six Sigma – Introduced in 1986 by Motorola, six sigma focuses on process improvement.
Statistics are used to measure the quality and capabilities of processes and eliminate
defects.
ISO/IEC 20000 – This internationally recognized standard has two parts. ISO/IEC 20000-1
provides best practices for developing and implementing an ITSM solution and ISO/IEC
20000-2 provides best practices for integrating people, process, and technology. ISO/IEC
20000 works in conjunction with ITIL and other ITSM frameworks
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) – A series of 23 documents that provide guidance
across the IT lifecycle with the goal of helping IT establish consistent and cost-effective
services.
TOGAF – The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) provides methods and
solutions, which include the Architecture Development Method for managing the lifecycle
of architecture using repeatable processes.
FitSM – A free and lightweight ITSM standard with the goal of creating a clear standard for
effective ITSM. FitSM is not managed by an established standards organization.
eTOM – Business operations framework specifically for telecommunications service
providers.
The most popular frameworks and processes
 47% use Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for ITSM, which focuses
on aligning IT services with the business needs
 36% use Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT)
 36% are using Business Process Framework (eTom) - commonly used by telecom
service providers in the telecommunications industry
 34% use Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) - provides another framework for
managing the IT life cycle
5. How to implement the ITSM processes?
The way to choose the right ITSM processes is to look at what your business needs,
specifically. For instance, if you have a small IT support team that’s constantly firefighting
similar issues, it makes more sense to find the root cause and resolve it once and for all. A
simple example of it would be a storage space issue – you can keep deleting files and
applications every time the hard drive maxes out. But simply installing a bigger hard drive is
a better longer-term solution.
In ITSM terms, it translates to going from mere Incident Management to Problem
Management. In the example above, the computer running out of storage space is the
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incident and the hard drive capacity being inadequate is the underlying problem. Of course,
IT support teams in larger organizations typically handle incidents that are much more
complex and send problems over to dedicated problem management teams.
ITSM processes require not just an ITSM tool to implement but a cultural change. The
customers (end users) need to see IT as a service provider and not just as another
department in their organization.
ITSM processes should be implemented keeping the following in mind:
 The maturity of the team - Is your team mature enough to require the adoption of
ITSM processes? An organization with a total of 25 people would not benefit from
adopting ITSM processes as much as an organization with 150 people that is
expanding rapidly.
 Problem statement - What is the issue that you’re trying to solve? Are you trying to
cut down on the IT budget? This can probably be achieved by bringing systematic
processes and predictability into the IT organization.
 Framework to be adopted - What is the framework you are looking to adopt? This
largely depends on the problem statement. While every framework helps you
achieve structure and predictability in varying capacity, the processes they employ
are different.
6. Briefly describe what the following ITSM processes do:
a. Incident management
b. Problem management
c. Asset management
d. Change management
e. Knowledge management
a. Incident management: Incident management is the practice governing the
restoration or rectification of any interruptions in service, due to outages or
performance issues.
b. Problem management: Often times, an IT organization may face a problem with
multiple incidents reporting similar issues. This comes under problem management,
as problem management focusses on conducting a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and
put an end to the recurring problem.
c. Asset management: Every organization needs hardware or software assets to
function. The tracking, updating and mapping of assets is achieved through asset
management. Configuration management can be practiced with asset management
or as a separate process.
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d. Change management: Any change in service(s) offered, that takes place in an
organization are managed through change management. Release management is
often grouped under change management.
e. Knowledge management: Knowledge management reaches across domains in ITSM.
Knowledge management helps avoid duplication of work by tracking, documenting
and updating solutions in a knowledge base.
7. What are the ITSM Metrics & KPI’s for Measuring Success?
Some of the ITSM metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are discussed below:
a. Service availability
Most IT organizations define availability for IT services or configuration items.
Availability is typically determined by reliability, maintainability, serviceability,
performance and security. Availability is most often calculated as a percentage. This
calculation is often based on agreed service time (as defined in the SLA) and
downtime.
b. Time to resolve
There are a number of related “time to resolve” metrics worth considering when
measuring ITSM success. Whether focused on mean time between failures (MTBF),
mean time to failure (MTTF), or mean time to resolve/repair (MTTR). Time to resolve
(MTTR) typically represents the average time to resolve a ticket or issue.
c. First-call resolution rate
First Call Resolution (FCR) rate is the percentage of issues properly resolved during
the customer’s first call, therefore eliminating any subsequent calls or interactions
on the issue.
d. SLA breach rate
An SLA breach rate is the percentage of tickets that have broken, or breached, an
SLA. For instance, if a critical ticket was resolved in eight hours instead of five hours
as required by an SLA, this ticket has breached the SLA. SLA breach is often due to
either insufficient staffing or incapability of staff and often leads to adding more
training or more staff to prevent future breaches.
e. Customer & User satisfaction
Customer and End-user satisfaction is typically measured through a periodic survey
or other feedback mechanism. Without measuring user satisfaction, a service desk
can sometimes find itself focused more on KPI’s than the business outcome that the
KPI’s are intended to measure. Customer and User satisfaction is one of the primary
business outcomes of ITSM.
f. Cost per contact
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Cost Per Contact, or Cost Per Ticket, is essentially the dollar amount of operating
expense of the Service management organization divided by ticket or contact
volume. Typically, this is calculated on a monthly basis. Operating expenses often
include: salaries and benefits for personnel, hardware, software,
telecommunications, and other related expenses.
g. Net promoter score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a proven way of gauging – and improving – customer
satisfaction and loyalty with a product, service, or company. NPS attempts to make
customer satisfaction scores understandable by focusing on a single statistic. You
may have taken an NPS survey in the past if you’ve been asked the question, “On a
scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” NPS is
a type of user or customer satisfaction score. NPS is calculated by subtracting the
percent of low-satisfaction customers (scored 6 or below) from the high-satisfaction
customers (scored 9 or 10), ignoring neutral scores (7 and 8). NPS can be a useful KPI
for IT Service Management organizations when taken into account with other critical
metrics.
8. What is an ITSM tool? How to select an ITSM tool?
An ITSM tool is a software used to deliver IT Services. It can be a standalone software or
a suite of applications, consisting of multiple apps to perform various functions. An ITSM
tool can perform multiple functions, like, incident management, handling service
requests, problem management, and change management, to name a few. An ITSM tool
will often consist of a CMDB as well.
Selecting an ITSM tool is not just an IT decision, it affects the entire organization. Since
there are multiple stakeholders in the selection of an ITSM tool, it is important that the
right ITSM tool is chosen for your organization.
When selecting a new ITSM tool, keep your existing ITSM processes in mind to decide
what features and capabilities you’d need. This will help you select an ITSM tool based
on its actual value to your organization rather than its price alone.
Before selecting an ITSM tool, ask yourself these questions:
What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Go back to the basics. See what’s missing from
your existing ITSM processes. What can you do to improve the delivery of your IT services?
Where would an ITSM tool fit into this?
What are your organization’s ITSM requirements? Are you trying to manage assets? Are
you looking to implement a self-service portal? Are you looking to streamline service
requests? Answering these questions will help you refine your list of requirements and
narrow your search.
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What do you expect from your ITSM tool? Expectations of your ITSM tool would largely
depend on your organization’s current processes. If you’re using multiple 3rd party
applications, you would expect your ITSM tool to integrate with all of them. If you have
many workflows, you’d expect workflow automations.
9. Discuss the future of ITSM
There’s an emerging approach to leverage product/service-oriented cross-functional
teams. This model of team structuring has been around for some time in other industry
verticals but has recently been a focus of Agile and now DevOps. Establishing, leading,
and managing cross-functional teams is a new organizational paradigm and takes
different approaches to traditional management models. I see this topic becoming very
relevant by 2020.
Also, the IT supply chain continues to grow in complexity in relation to vendor
integration. Organizations will look to service and process governance structures such as
process ownership, service management offices (SMOs), and service integration – or
service integration and management (SIAM) – functions to support the goal of bringing
more consistency and coherence into their overall value systems.
Research highlights show the following trends in rules and roles for future ITSM:
 Cloud computing: ITSM teams are playing a more dynamic and service-aware
role in managing cloud investments through a growing focus on such things as
higher levels of automation and more attention to DevOps. ITSM teams are also
integrating cloud services into their service catalogs — with SaaS (internal cloud)
services, IaaS (internal cloud) services, and SaaS and IaaS services in public cloud
tied for third.
 The move to support enterprise services is also changing ITSM rules and roles.
Only 89% of respondents had plans to consolidate IT and non-IT customer service
— up from just two years ago when only 75% had plans to consolidate.
 Mobility is seriously changing the ITSM — in terms of both improved IT
efficiencies and end-user outreach. 85% of our respondents had mobile support
for end users, often across heterogeneous environments (tablets, iPhones, and
Android phones, as examples). And 50% allowed end users to make ITSM-related
service requests via these devices, making ITSM teams, and IT as a whole,
considerably more consumer-friendly.
The Future of ITSM with AI
With AI technology such as smart machines making their way into corporate and
government networks, AI is, like it or not, going to be a dominant solution in any ITSM
system. There simply aren’t enough resources for analysts to get personally involved
with so many requests and incidents (one-to-one). For better or worse, in the future,
human intervention for any request or incident (one to one) will not be sustainable.
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Therefore, we will see many organizations turn to chatbots with AI capabilities as a
means to handle, for example, front line IT support calls.
ITSM analysts will then shift their focus to major incidents (one-to-many), problem
management, and change management. They will focus more on business objectives
instead of IT objectives.
Although ITSM solutions are rapidly evolving, service management will never go away as
long as IT exists. However, by implementing AI technology, IT service management will
experience a disruptive change that will alter the way humans are involved with the
service management process. It is also important to note that these disruptive changes
will affect all service management operations, not just IT service management.
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