Service management is a discipline that manages IT systems in a holistic, business-centred manner. The approach encompasses everything from the operations architecture to business process management.

Historically, the focus for IT teams has been on how well they look after the increasing complexity and diversity of systems, infrastructures and applications. Increasingly, the emphasis is on matching IT resources to business priorities and then reporting service quality in business metrics.

Peter O’Neill, principal analyst at Forrester Research, says IT departments have spent the past 10 years getting to grips with IT service management. And as more organisations improve their IT service delivery, attention is being turned towards presenting their business value more positively.

“With IT service management under control, IT operations are now able to undertake a dramatic change”, says O’Neill. “Pressure from the business to improve service quality, while reducing costs, is forcing IT departments to act as service providers; they must structure themselves as business units, using best practices, process streamlining and automation.”

Service management is moving from a discipline for managing IT systems towards a philosophy of business service management (BSM), where the business-focused IT services are dynamically linked to the underlying IT infrastructure.

Pressure from the board, lack of awareness and limited resources are all adding to the burden on IT directors. Gary Pearson, professional services director at service management outsourcer Esteem, says the drive towards service management comes from the internal insistence to do more with less.

“Organisations are looking for more effective ways of doing things, and IT directors tend to be ambitious with what they want to achieve in the time available,” he says. “Most companies are looking to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), with its widely accepted, meaningful standards, to provide some p rotection for the future.”

ITIL is a collection of best practices for IT service management and was created between 1986 and 1992, based on the work undertaken by the UK Government Information Infrastructure Management Forum.

The latest version, ITIL v3, focuses on the entire service life and takes the needs of the business into consideration. Over the past 10 years, wider scale adoption of the ITIL concept has increased, and it is often linked with IT governance through the Control Objects for Information and related Technology (CobiT) set of best practices.

For Fay Heatley, IT unit operations manager at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, ITIL is providing her team with structured methods for operation.

“Now we are working to defined standards we are able to be much more proactive, rather than simply reactive when issues arise,” she says. “However, because we are a multi-sourced supplier of in-house IT services to the council, we also have to manage our suppliers, as well as the standards, to ensure that everyone adheres to the rules.”

One year down the path of implementing ITIL best practice, the authority is already seeing the benefits of the strategy.

“ITIL has certainly helped our internal teams – ­ they know exactly what to do and how to advise the customers,” says Heatley.

“It has also helped with the training of our call centre staff, who are now able to deal with a higher throughput of calls.

“Although call levels have increased by 50 per cent, the workload has not increased proportionately. We are now capturing and recording all the work that we are undertaking. And that is good for compliance and governance.”

Processes are a key area of service management. Over the years there have been numerous attempts at making processes better, either under the guise of quality management or business process management.

But Ian Charlesworth, principal analyst at Ovum, says organisations have been embarking on process automation and not processes improvement.

“The trend has been to take what you are doing and do it quicker, rather than trying to do it better,” he says. “What we will see in the next few years is a trend to move from automating processes to optimising processes by focusing on the outcome of the tasks rather than the transition of the process.”

While automation has certainly improved the speed and reduced the costs of business processes, it has not always improved the process or ensured that it works within the context of the organisation, as Stuart McHennery, IT director of drinks dispensing systems supplier and installer Innserve, discovered when automating his engineer scheduling system.

“Faster isn’t always better,” he says, when recalling the firm’s first attempt to automate a previously manual process.

“With 98,000 sites to service, our business is reactive and requirements change throughout the day. We discovered that we needed to refine the process, learning from the traps that the technology lays for us, such as doing things rapidly and slickly but far too quickly for the guys on the ground to react to. We are now using the technology, but in a different way, to optimise the process and improve the outcomes by getting the guys on site faster, rather than simply speeding up the old process.”

While there are enormous gains to be made from making even small improvements to a process – ­ which is why huge amounts of money are still being spent on IT infrastructure and bandwidth – ­ technology is now providing the tools to understand processes and improve them further.

Business process optimisation offers companies an alternative approach; to use the intelligence held within the organisation to make processes even more effective.

“With business process automation you risk doing the wrong things faster if you don’t keep revisiting process performance,” says Charlesworth. “Business process optimisation lets you do the right things quicker.”

And the management of business processes is about to go through even more change.

Analytics and simulation software have the ability to examine processes end-to-end and look at the implications of change on profitability, other parts of the organisation and even on the process itself. Complex event processing techniques can correlate the tens of thousands of events that might make up a business process, and use the results to determine, change and manage the outcomes of that process.