Yesterday we published on Habré for those who would like to deal with ITSM - to study trends and tools. Today we continue to talk about how to integrate ITSM into the company's business processes, and what cloud tools can help with this.
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What do you want from this
The traditional approach to managing IT departments is called resource management. In simple terms, it implies a focus on working with servers, networks and other hardware - “IT resources”. Guided by this model, the IT department often overlooks what other departments are doing, and starts not from their "user" requirements and the needs of the company's customers, but goes from the other side - from resources.
An alternative to this approach to IT management is ITSM (IT Service Management). This is a service method that proposes to focus not on technology and hardware, but on users (which can be both employees of the organization and customers) and their needs.
Как representatives of IBM, this approach makes it possible to reduce transaction costs and improve the quality of services provided by the IT department.
What gives ITSM in practice
The ITSM methodology makes the IT department a service provider for other parts of the organization. It ceases to be an auxiliary element responsible for maintaining the health of the IT infrastructure: individual servers, networks and applications.
The company formalizes the services that it wants to receive from the IT department, and moves to work according to the “customer-supplier” model. As a result, the business begins to present its requirements for services, formulating the problems and challenges that users face. And the IT department already decides with what technical means to meet these needs.
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In general, the company's infrastructure is divided into separate services that automate certain business tasks. To manage these services, specialized software platforms are used. The most famous in the ITSM market is the ServiceNow cloud system. For several years now, she in the Gartner Quadrant.
We are in "» we are engaged in the integration of ServiceNow solutions.
We will tell you how to approach the integration of ITSM in a company. We will give several business processes, the automation of which allows you to optimize the work of IT departments. We will also talk about the ServiceNow platform tools that help to do this.
Where to start and what tools are available
. This is the process that is responsible for accounting for IT assets throughout their life cycle: from acquisition or development to retirement. In this case, IT assets include various kinds of software and hardware: PCs, laptops, servers, office equipment, Internet resources. Automation of asset management allows the company to spend resources more efficiently and predict needs.
Two ServiceNow applications, Discovery and Mapping Service, can help with this task. The first automatically finds and identifies new assets (for example, servers connected to the corporate network) and enters information about them into a special database (called ).
The second defines the relationship between services and the infrastructure elements on which these services are built. As a result, all processes in the IT department and the company become more transparent.
We talked about how to implement asset management and work with these two applications in a corporate blog - there is a detailed practical guide ( и ). In it, we touched on all stages of implementation: from planning to audit.
. This is a process, part of which is the optimization of IT services from an economic point of view. The IT department and organization need to collect financial information to understand the overall cost and revenue picture.
The ServiceNow Financial Management module can help you collect this information. It is a single control panel where IT department employees can plan budgets, keep track of costs for various activities and issue invoices for services (both to other departments of the organization and to its clients). You can see what it looks like in ServiceNow Financial Management tool. We have also prepared on the implementation of financial management processes - in it we analyze the main stages.
. The purpose of this process is to monitor IT infrastructure components and load balance. IT professionals must understand how a change in the performance of a server or network switch will affect the quality of services provided.
The ServiceWatch service portal can help with this task. It collects information about the infrastructure using the already mentioned Discovery module and automatically builds dependencies between business services and IT services. How to collect data about IT systems using Discovery we told . Even prepared .
. These portals give users the opportunity to solve their own problems with software or hardware, without resorting to the help of technical support specialists. There are several options for building such portals - static knowledge bases, FAQs or dynamic pages with the ability to accept applications.
We talked about the types of portals in more detail in one of the past .
The tool of the same name from ServiceNow helps to create such Service Portals. The appearance of the portal is customized with additional pages or widgets, as well as with the help of AngularJS, SCSS and JavaScript development tools.
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. This is a process based on agile development methodologies. They have many advantages (continuous development and change, iteration), but the fragmentation of small development teams, each of which is engaged in its own project, does not always give management a vision of the overall situation and progress.
The ServiceNow Agile Development tool solves the problem and gives centralized control over the development process. This approach facilitates the process of collaboration and control over the entire life cycle of software development: from planning to support of the finished system. We talked about how to get started with the Agile Development tool .
Of course, these are not all processes that can be standardized and automated using ITSM and ServiceNow. We talk about other features of the platform - there is an opportunity to our specialists.
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Source: habr.com