What is IT Service Management?
IT Service Management (ITSM) is a disciplined approach that focuses on designing, delivering, managing, and improving IT services to meet the needs of an organization. It helps ensure our services provide value to users and the community. ITSM uses various practices and frameworks, such as ITIL, to standardize how IT services are managed. Strengthening ITSM Foundations is listed as one of the strategic efforts on the Berkeley IT Short-Term Strategy for FY25-27.
Why is ITSM important at UC Berkeley?
-
Improved Service Delivery: ITSM helps ensure that IT services are delivered consistently and effectively.
-
Reduced Costs: By streamlining processes and automating tasks, ITSM can reduce costs.
-
Increased User Satisfaction: When IT services are well-managed, users are more likely to be satisfied.
-
Enhanced Business Alignment: ITSM helps align IT services with campus community goals and objectives.
-
Improved Agility: ITSM enables IT to respond more quickly to changing business needs.
Key Aspects of ITSM
- Service Strategy: Establishes the services that IT will offer and ensures they are aligned with the goals of the organization. Creates a service model on how value will be delivered via services, how they will be delivered, funded, to whom, and for what purpose.
- Service Design: Designs new services or service changes to meet current and future needs. Aligns IT solutions with business requirements and establishes service level agreements and overall design constraints.
- Service Transition: Focuses on protecting the community from disruptions. Ensuring any new or changed services are well built, tested, and provide the appropriate level of knowledge/training to support staff, end users, and are well communicated.
- Service Operation: Reduces duration and frequency of service disruptions. Day-to-day support of the services - managing incidents, requests, and changes within the agreed-upon service level agreement (SLA) that was established during Service Design.
- Continual Service Improvement (CSI): Validates that the services are achieving the goals and values established in Service Strategy. Measurements against agreed-upon SLAs with the business and any operational level agreements (OLAs) with technical services. Opportunity to schedule service review meetings and log any improvements into the service improvement plan. Identify services considered for retirement.
We are building practice foundations, starting with our focus on six practices.
-
Service Catalog Management: Provide a single source of consistent information on all services and service offerings, and ensure that the service catalog is available to the relevant audience.
-
Request Management: Ensure all users in the organization can easily find, request, and track all Berkeley IT services offered.
-
Incident Management: Prioritize, categorize, respond, and resolve interruptions in order to restore service for the user quickly.
-
Knowledge Management: Deliver the right information to the right people at the right time to improve self-service, decision-making, and innovation throughout the university.
-
Change Management: Facilitate the implementation of changes to service components while minimizing risk and impact to the organization.
- Configuration Management: Provide a centralized, trustworthy map of IT services, critical components, and their relationships across all environments so Berkeley IT units can confidently plan changes and quickly resolve incidents across all platforms.
What ITSM initiatives are currently underway?
-
Defining Service Framework: Understanding our Service and Service Offerings with a focused effort on Berkeley IT and refreshing our Service Catalog
-
Establishing ITSM Practice Foundations: Creating standards for our foundational practices, providing training, and measuring against key performance indicators (KPI’s) through our ITSM Practice Council.
-
Establishing Service Management Community and Learning Paths: Establishing clear and sustainable roles and responsibilities for service owners and service managers, along with resources and toolkits to support these roles.
-
Implementing CMDB: Create a trustworthy data source that shows the relationship between service components and provides information to improve our service management capabilities.
- ITSM Governance: Ensure that IT services are aligned with campus community goals, optimized for efficiency, and managed effectively.
For additional assistance on our ITSM practices and procedures, please contact us for consultation
