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What is IT Service Management?

John Smith
11.02.21

IT Service Management (ITSM) forms an integral part of the Technical Operations (TechOps) stream at FDM, which offers the opportunity to benefit from expert training and experience working with our leading clients.

IT Service Management is about delivering, maintaining and improving IT services within an organisation. These IT services come in many forms – from widely-used web-based applications, such as your personal banking application, through to the multitude of finance, HR and customer relationship management software that companies use to conduct business.

IT services play a crucial part in the success of companies around the world, helping to make operational processes more efficient and accurate. Organisations and individuals are highly dependent on these IT services and the role of ITSM, or Technical Operations Analysts, is to make sure that these services are fully functional.

Benefits of ITSM

Implementing Technical Operations processes offers a wide range of benefits for the company, its employees and customers.

Firstly, ITSM services are useful on an economic level, helping lower costs for IT operations and increase overall ROI. ITSM is also an effective way to establish sustainable and standardised processes to help reduce the risk of errors and improve productivity of daily operations. This can also include automation, which reduces time spent on repetitive tasks and allows employees to focus on more valuable work.

With well-defined processes in place, organisations can implement IT changes with reduced risk and keep up-to-date with ever-advancing technology and support positive change initiatives.

ITSM is not only beneficial on an internal level. It can also help improve service and customer experience by aligning organisational activity with business needs. This will result in a company that prioritises what’s most important and delivers better customer services. It is also key for streamlining or creating business response systems to client incident reports or requests.

Managing Services with ITSM

To ensure these services are delivered, maintained and improved in a safe and controlled manner, IT Service Management provides a framework of processes to guarantee a consistent outcome is achieved and avoid the risk of service failure.

To put this into perspective, imagine that you have to build a car and all you have is a  bunch of parts and some tools laid out in front of you. You don’t have any documentation to describe how this was done before and no defined outcome. Does the customer want a sports car or an off-road vehicle and how do you check the car is safe and roadworthy? This situation highlights the importance of processes and that without them, the outcome is likely to be an unreliable and unsafe vehicle that your customer will not want to drive! The same scenario applies if you want to build an application for a client, and clearly, we want to avoid this outcome.

IT Service Management provides a framework of processes to ensure you have the right checks in place to mitigate the risks associated with uncontrolled and uncoordinated services. Some of these include:

Working as an ITSM consultant, you will need to ensure that all processes are clearly defined, understood by everyone, adhered to, and continuously improved to move with the changing business.

IT Service Management at FDM

The Technical Operations stream at FDM is designed to fully prepare you for a career in IT Service Management. Our world-renowned training programme will take your current knowledge and skills and develop them to become commercially relevant, in line with our leading clients’ requirements. This will enable you to understand the technical landscape of the business you are operating in.

Our programme includes training in ITIL, a widely-recognised industry standard which is useful to set the scene for best-practice Service Management as well as core technical areas in databases, networking and operating systems (Linux and Windows).

A career in IT Service Management is challenging, dynamic and exciting and the possibilities for career progression are limitless. To find out more about the role and apply, check out the FDM Ex-Forces, Returners or Technical Operations Graduate Programme.