ServiceNow ITSM Essentials
ServiceNow ITSM is an industry-leading platform that helps companies automate IT workflows and streamline processes. It also helps organizations improve productivity and customer satisfaction with an AI-powered dashboard that is easy to navigate.
ServiceNow ITSM offers a range of modules to meet the needs of different businesses. These include service portals, service catalogs, knowledge bases and contextual collaboration tools.
Service Request Management
Service Request Management (SRM) is a process and tool that provides all departments within an organization with a self-service platform to accept, keep track of, respond to and close a variety of service requests.
It helps reduce workloads, improve accuracy and move service requests towards completion. It also enables teams to better manage their request fulfillment processes, with automated workflow business rules that help eliminate manual errors and keep your IT processes running smoothly.
With ITSM, companies like Conagra, Copenhagen Airport and Airbus can build digital-first service experiences across IT, HR, facilities, finance, legal and other departments from a single platform. They can deliver high-quality IT services proactively and at scale while continually improving their processes.
Incident Management
Incident management is a process that ensures that IT incidents are addressed and resolved promptly. This helps ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are met and reduces customer frustration.
Modern incident management tools take advantage of automation and AI to eliminate bottlenecks in the resolution of issues. This also allows for better visibility into the system, allowing you to identify trends that may impact your organization’s overall performance.
Moreover, an effective incident management system helps build institutional knowledge over time. This knowledge can be either held by staff or integrated into an automated system, which helps you build a playbook for future solutions to similar problems.
Problem Management
Problem management is a process that helps identify and resolve issues that affect service delivery. It also helps proactively prevent future incidents from occurring by identifying underlying causes.
Problems can be created using a problem ticket and can have attached problem tasks, which are light-weight records that allow managers to assign task owners who can then track their progress.
Problems can be categorized into six states- New, Assess, Root Cause Analysis, Fix in Progress, Resolved and Closed. The problem manager is responsible for managing the problem throughout its lifecycle and can triage, categorize, and prioritize it.
Change Management
Change management is an important practice that is used to ensure that the organization and its employees are prepared for any changes. It can help mitigate disruption, reduce costs and time to implementation, improve leadership skills and drive innovation.
Moreover, it can also help strengthen relationships between management and employees. Employees may be more willing to work with the company if they feel like their concerns and fears are addressed.
Business managers who want to implement a major transformation should work closely with HR staff to gain employee acceptance and support. This can increase employee morale and make the transformation successful.
Service Level Management
Service Level Management is a way to set expectations between the customer and the IT organization. These are often outlined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
The SLA establishes a two-way accountability for service, provides a standard to measure performance against, and outlines what should happen when a problem arises.
It is a practice that can be adopted by all levels of the business. Whether you want to improve cycle times or increase the number of cases your team solves, SLM can help you achieve this goal.
Service Portfolio Management
Service Portfolio Management is the process of managing a company’s entire IT/business service portfolio. It helps companies assess, plan and make investment decisions on services to offer to customers while also ensuring they deliver maximum value within managed risks and costs.
In this regard, the practice is very similar to Project Portfolio Management.
The primary difference is that while Project Portfolio Management manages projects, Service Portfolio Management manages services. It is therefore a critical part of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, especially when you are planning new services or changes to existing ones.
Vendor Management
Vendor Management is a part of ITSM that focuses on managing the relationship with vendors, from evaluating their performance to identifying hidden costs. This process can help businesses establish long-term relationships with reliable suppliers, which can increase productivity and reduce operational costs.
Using vendor management software can help manage this process, from onboarding vendors to monitoring their performance against organizational standards. The software also helps organizations avoid compliance risks and reduce additional recruiting and training costs.
