Cut the fluff – Why ITSM needs to simplify

IT Service Management (ITSM). A phrase that seems fairly simple to understand but has become a hugely complex and involved industry.

To most people, IT Service Management is just that: managing the service offered by IT. But what does this mean in practice? Searching for a definition online, you are confronted by a host of websites, whose jargon-filled definitions leave things as clear as mud. There is even a warning at the top of the Wikipedia entry that states: “The lead section of this article may need to be rewritten. The reason given is: unclear definition and too many fluff words.” And really, this could be said to reflect the ITSM industry as a whole. With vendors offering more and more complex configurations, with complex and unclear pricing structures.

In the 1980s, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was established by the UK Government to create a set of guidelines, initially, that promoted best practice for IT within the public sector. These were taken up by private companies too and, as IT in business grew, the guidelines became almost an unofficial Kitemark. The more ITIL processes that your IT service management conformed to, the better it looked.

But are more processes necessarily better? Should things not be simpler with fewer, but clearer processes, that inherently conform to best practice ideals? The IT sector has been serving businesses for more than 30 years now. Best practices are well-known and obviously adhered to as inefficiencies will have long been weeded out. Indeed, ITIL is now expected to be a part of any serious ITSM tool and organisations no longer tend to focus on how many processes a solution has.

The role of IT within modern organisations has changed significantly

The needs of internal and external customers, staff, suppliers and a myriad of software and hardware assets have totally changed the service landscape. So instead of IT service management, firms need service management across the whole business. The best practice for any organisation would be a unified and seamless service offering employees, contractors and customers the same level of support.

Imagine a product that could allow you to request help for a computer issue, book a room for a meeting, update all your software, manage your customer or staff database, allow customers to log requests or complain and reach the right people and get the right help in a short time, and so on. Surely this would be the best, most efficient and simplest of solutions, whether you are a large multinational or an SME business. Vendors across the industry are offering their own forms of organisation service management with different levels of success. This is due to the fact that most of them are built on older platforms and are being manipulated or forced to bend to the process complexity of other departmental or customer needs. Speed, database and configuration issues abound in a confused and costly approach to modern requirements.

Delivering a simplified approach

The ITSM industry has long needed a fresh and simplified approach where the product has been built, from scratch to take care of modern requirements. Welcome 4me. It is a service management tool for the entire business, not just IT.  It enables disparate departments and organisations to communicate data across a unified process model. 4me means there will be no more gaps in service provision or invisible data – just an efficient network of users. It will ensure efficiencies are gained in time and money.