IT service management (ITSM) encompasses a range of disciplines and best practice recommendations, as well as various elements of software and hardware infrastructure.

Such a wide scope means there is no official definition for ITSM ­ but it is perhaps best described as any process that checks whatever IT systems are in place to see how they are functioning in terms of performance and availability, either from a technical or a user perspective.

Modern IT service management professionals can expect to be familiar with a range of processes, such as business process management, Six Sigma management techniques, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and control objectives for information and related technology (Cobit). Most professionals, however, tend to specialise in no more than one or two processes at a time.

Lionel Lamy, research director in IDC’s European software and services group, says the need for IT professionals to apply ITSM and IT service level management (ITSLM) principles and methodology in different scenarios has expanded in recent years, and now presents a different type of challenge. “Five years ago, businesses were not using ITSM as much as they are now, or at least, they were not introducing it so early in the contract negotiation phase,” he says.

“Ten years ago, ITSM covered simple things such as whether the network was up or down, or whether or not a server was working; now it is much more about software and measuring the quality aspect from the user point of view. It is very easy to measure factors such as whether or not a network is down, but it is much harder to gauge whether a user thinks they have had a good experience, for example.”

While there might not necessarily have been an increase in demand for ITSM skills or knowledge per se, there has certainly been more pressure for companies to tighten things up by better management of service level agreements (SLAs).

“Having a good SLA is one thing, but if you follow it up with governance of those SLAs, you can honestly say you are doing all you can, whether it is desktop management, convergence or anything else,” says Lamy.

Megan Pendlebury, services management executive at the UK IT Services Management Forum (ITSMF), agrees that the market for ITSM has changed in recent years, with the previously tight focus on IT having been replaced by a wider business services perspective.

“Rather than look for a techie, or people qualified in specific technology disciplines, companies are far more likely to look for staff with business minds who are able to deal with customers and people. The softer side is much more important than it used to be,” she says.

IDC’s Lamy says a lot of the pressure to adopt ITSM practices is on the supplier side, with prospective customers and business partners unwilling to sit down with anyone that cannot offer compliance with specific methodologies or frameworks.
With infrastructure-related IT service management, for example, companies such as banks or car manufacturers want the supplier to tell them how they will manage cost and provide feedback. And the suppliers need to show they can follow IT procedures and factor in industry standards.

“If the suppliers want to play poker, they have to bring the right stake to the table,” says Lamy. “Any company that sells in the IT services industry today, from IBM downwards, must have ITIL skills or I doubt they will even be invited to the table. If they do not talk SLAs, SLM and ITIL they will not be taken as seriously as those companies that do.”

Agreeing compliance with ITSM practices in advance is a good way of making sure that user companies hold contractors to account. But it should also give sufficient visibility into the processes involved, so the business can tell at a glance whether suppliers are doing a good job.

Being able to check back to see if things were done correctly is often essential over the course of long contracts, where the buyer might not be able to remember what the terms of the agreement were when it was first signed, says Lamy.

“It is a way for suppliers to ensure that they deliver the quality they promised to the company that signed the contract,” he says. “It is not necessarily a way to hit people with a stick or involve legal departments ­- it is more a way of formalising an open agreement to give both parties peace of mind.”

Lynn Lawton is international president of ISACA (previously known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association), an organisation with estimated membership of 75,000 ITSM professionals in more than 160 countries.

ISACA provides education, resource sharing, advocacy, professional networking and other benefits, including its own Certified Information Systems Auditor and Certified Information Security Manager certifications.

Lawton says adherence to ITSM best practice frameworks also improves internal communication between different parties that could previously have struggled to understand each other’s perspective.

“The biggest benefits they talk about when Cobit is implemented, for example, is having business and IT people support each other ­ when even the IT auditors speak the same language,” she says.

More chief information officers (CIOs) are sitting up and taking notice of ITSM methodologies, such as the recently released third version of ITIL, largely because of potential cost savings that streamlined business processes can provide. As a result, demand for ITSM knowledge within user organisations has also increased.

Eddie Kilkelly, operations director at the ILX Group, a training company specialising in delivering ITSM, project management and business finance courses to UK IT professionals, says the third version of ITIL in particular has started to raise awareness of the need for ITSM skills within companies.

“We have seen steady year-on-year growth in demand for ITIL skills over the past 14 to 15 years, but especially in the past year with the launch of ITIL version three,” he says. “There was some hesitance previously, but now many companies appear to have taken stock and started to ask themselves if they are really ready for it.”

Insourcing versus outsourcing

There is some dispute as to whether ITSM skills and knowledge, as with other areas of IT, are more likely to be outsourced to third parties rather than kept in-house. Lawton says ITSM roles are certainly not being sent offshore, and points to healthy attendance at ISACA events as proof.

“The biggest conference we have is held in the US and it attracts 1,100 people ­ a mixture of IT auditors, security specialists and administrators who are responsible for Cobit implementations,” she says.

“Those who offshore Cobit skills are often not doing it because of cost, they are doing it because they cannot get the skills in-house.”

Dave Clarke is programme executive at the Environment Agency, which is expanding its use of business process management to handle angling permits, inspections and compliance. The agency also aims to deploy customer relationship management tools to provide its customers with a single key that enables them to manage their permits using a web-based login.

“We have a few ITSM skills in-house, but we mostly rely on contractor-based teams to work alongside our major developers. Long-term ITSM skills are not something we have waiting on the shelf, so we are trying to transfer some across,” said Clarke.

Whatever happens, it seems likely that for some companies at least, the IT in ITSM might become less of a focus and staff could be forced into shedding specific skills.

The ITSMF’s Pendlebury says IT professionals can expect a further change during the next five years, as IT-specific service management expands to incorporate other areas, such as facilities management.

“The people who get the jobs will have skills on the fluffy side, such as people skills management, customer management and that type of thing,” she says.

The most popular IT service management approaches

ITIL

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most in-demand ITSM methodology among both suppliers and customers. Popularity has continued to increase since June last year, when the core books for the third version of ITIL were published. The modified version adds a more integrated service lifecycle approach to ITSM, as opposed to organising itself around the concepts of IT service delivery and customer support.

Cobit

The control objectives for Information and related technology (Cobit) is a best practice framework created by ISACA and the IT Governance Institute. Now in version 4.1, Cobit includes 34 processes that cover 210 control objectives categorised into four separate domains: planning and organisation, acquisition and
implementation, delivery and support, and monitoring and evaluation.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma was originally developed by Motorola as a set of practices designed specifically to improve manufacturing processes, but its application has since been extended to a wider range of business processes. Six Sigma defines key roles within the company for successful project implementation ­ executive leadership, champions, master black belts, black belts, green belts and yellow belts. It uses established quality management methods, including business and thought-process mapping, cost-benefit analysis, customer surveys, regression analysis and control charts.

Customer service desk

Though largely defined in the first version of ITIL, the customer service desk framework is still very much in demand among smaller businesses looking to apply best practice to call centres, contact centres, helpdesks and service desks. It incorporates ITSM activities such as incident, problem, configuration, change, release, service level, availability, capacity, financial, IT service continuity and security management.