Modernizing ITSM with ITIL 4: Unifying ITSM and ITOM functions

The best practices and principles of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) 4 show IT service management (ITSM) service providers the importance of building a strong infrastructure that creates business value, adapts to change, tracks capabilities, and embraces automation.

Without collaboration between ITSM service providers and different functions of the enterprise, however, the benefits of ITIL 4 best practices are minimized. Silos negatively affect people, processes, and performance, restricting progress and innovation.

ITSM and IT operations management (ITOM) are two areas where collaboration is essential. Their relationship can be confusing, and adding ITIL standards can further complicate matters—especially when they use different versions of ITIL for their guiding principles.

However, ITIL 4 offers a resolution by combining the best of ITSM and ITOM functions, highlighting opportunities for the two to work together under one service operations model.

What’s the difference between ITSM and ITOM?

It’s easy to confuse ITSM and ITOM, so let’s summarize them like this:

• ITSM is how organizations deliver end-to-end IT service using various tools and processes.
• ITOM is the management of those tools and processes while overseeing the performance and capabilities of the organization’s IT infrastructure, including hardware, software, and networks.

Employees and customers interact with ITSM, which is the public-facing function of the enterprise’s IT infrastructure. For example, when an employee submits a help ticket for a technical issue with their laptop, they navigate the resolution process with ITSM.

ITOM, on the other hand, is the behind-the-scenes function that measures the performance of the enterprise’s IT infrastructure to ensure it meets the needs of the business. Using the example above, when the employee receives a quick response to their incident request from the IT service team, it’s because of the processes established by ITOM.

The service operations model

An enterprise must evaluate its business needs to define how ITSM and ITOM can help it achieve positive outcomes through an integrated approach.

A service operations model guided by ITIL 4 principles encourages holistic thinking and collaboration to best serve the needs of the enterprise. Debating whether ITSM is a part of ITOM, or vice versa, is irrelevant. Instead, channeling the energy and resources of both ITSM and ITOM can generate positive outcomes that touch every corner of the enterprise.

The service operations model converges ITSM and ITOM technological capabilities into a single system. It allows organizations to look at their ITOM tools and processes and see where capabilities (e.g., workflow automation, reporting and analytics, etc.) can be combined with ITSM to untangle complexity, reduce operational costs, and improve service performance.

Consolidating disparate tools

The ramifications on service operations of using disparate tools for ITSM and ITOM are more than technical. In fact, they stretch across people, processes, and performance.

When juggling multiple service and operations tools, organizations often experience costly and complex upgrade and integration efforts, multiple vendor relationships with different support methods, and duplicate, inconsistent, or outdated tools.

But those issues pale in comparison to the operational and business-level hurdles: changing operations and ways of working, the necessity for different skill sets to manage different tools, and siloed performance data and insights.

Consolidating service and operations tools helps address these issues, allowing enterprises to excel in process standardization/optimization and employee productivity improvement.

Remember, unifying ITSM and ITOM capabilities is not only a technical endeavor, but also a people project that involves overcoming resistance to change. The organizational change management tools and techniques in ITIL 4 can address concerns by explaining the need for change, communicating benefits, and providing training.

Evolving service operations with AIOps

AIOps describes the use of data, machine learning (ML), natural language understanding (NLU), and AI to automate service operations. When AIOps is part of ITOM, supports ITSM, and aligns with ITIL 4:

• Historical incident and event data is simplified for organizations to understand and predict business impact through automated alert correlation, prioritization, escalation, and remediation.
• ML helps slash response times by identifying root causes of incidents, events, and issues through automated root-cause analysis.
• IT services and infrastructure can be scaled to meet demand using automated capacity and cost optimization.
• ML embedded in automated workflows can filter low-value tasks and alerts from multiple systems, giving teams uninterrupted time to focus on high-priority issues in a single system of insights and actions.

A path to success

When ITSM and ITOM teams collaborate using ITIL 4 best practices, a powerful partnership emerges that can deliver improved capabilities and performance to meet stakeholder expectations.

Zooming out and looking at the entire map of modernizing ITSM services reveals an exciting path filled with opportunities and challenges at every turn.

ITIL 4 is your guide throughout this journey, showcasing how to support the enterprise in a way that aligns with business goals, creates value, and scales to meet growing expectations. Find out more in our ebook: Unifying ITSM and ITOM with ITIL 4.

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