IT Service Management (ITSM) is the practice of delivering and operating IT as a portfolio of business services. The book grounds ITSM in process discipline plus measurable outcomes.
12.1 Principles of IT Service Management
Five core ideas
Idea
What it means
Service orientation
IT delivers services, not just servers
Process discipline
Defined, repeatable, measured
Customer alignment
Business outcomes are the goal
Continual improvement
Measure, learn, adjust
Risk management
Residual risk is conscious and accepted
Standard processes
Process
Purpose
Incident management
Restore service after disruption
Problem management
Find and fix root causes
Change management
Control how production changes
Configuration management
CMDB; what we have and how it links
Release management
What ships when
Service desk
Single point of contact
Capacity / availability
Plan demand + uptime
Knowledge management
Institutional memory; KB
Maturity model
Level
Behaviour
Reactive
Ad-hoc; firefighting
Defined
Processes documented
Repeatable
Processes followed; metrics gathered
Managed
Metrics drive decisions
Optimised
Continual improvement; predictive
Worked example - small bank ITSM rollout
Year
Action
1
Ticketing tool + service catalogue + SLA per service
2
CMDB + change advisory + incident metrics
3
Problem management + capacity planning
4
Predictive (ML-driven incident prevention)
Common ITSM pitfalls
Pitfall
Why it backfires
Process for its own sake
No business outcome
CMDB as fantasy
Nobody updates it
SLA targets nobody funded
Cannot meet them
ServiceNow as a religion
Tool worship; misses purpose
Metrics gathered, never acted on
No improvement loop
Mentor’s tip: ITSM = services + processes + customer outcomes. Service catalogue + CMDB + SLA register are the three artefacts that tie ITSM to EA. Maturity comes from a continual improvement loop; tools alone do not deliver it.
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