What makes Service Management so important for IT?

The origin of service management is in traditional service companies such as airlines, banks, hotels, and telecommunications companies.

Its practice has grown due to the adoption of IT organizations, which address the management of applications, infrastructure, and service-oriented processes.

Solutions to business problems and support for business models, strategies, and operations are increasingly in the form of services.

The popularity of shared services and outsourcing has contributed to the increase in the number of organizations that behave as service providers, including internal IT organizations.

This, in turn, reinforced the practice of service management and imposed greater challenges.

According to ITIL®, Service Management is “a set of enterprise capabilities for delivering value to customers in the form of services.”

We will translate capabilities as competencies, which, when added to resources, result in IT services, according to ITIL.

These services must be managed and monitored to support the company’s business, aligning with the organization’s expectations.

Let us also consider that IT Service Management can be expressed as an integrated set of processes, that is, a collection of properly coordinated activities. 

IT Service Management is a process-oriented strategy for delivering IT services, focused on the customer, which meets the set of cost and performance goals established in partnership with business customers and incorporated with Service Level Agreements.

Thus, IT must respond quickly to business changes from an organization without interrupting current processes.

Some of the benefits of having service management are:

• Increased quality in the provision of IT services to the business
• Clear view of IT capacity
• More information on IT services
• Motivated team
• Greater customer satisfaction
• Lower resistance to change

We can cite some examples of competencies, such as management, organization, knowledge, people, and resources such as infrastructure, application, information, etc.

Remember that competencies transform resources into service delivery, consequently producing value. The presence of competency without necessary resources or IT resources without competency on them will result in a weak and worthless service.