Navigating the world of Service Management

As we gear up for DTX Europe on the 4-5th October 2023, we’re excited to be starting a new series dedicated to everything Service Management. The aim of this series is to understand the importance of Service Management while exploring how to implement it seamlessly into service delivery. 

To kick off, let’s start by unravelling the foundations of Service Management, its role in delivering great customer experiences and some of the challenges. 

What is Service Management and why is it important?

The role of ‘Service Management’ is to provide services to IT that enable the smooth delivery of services to end users or consumers of them. Service Management teams tend to follow ITIL-based frameworks and processes. This enables them to deliver services in a standard way and benefit from industry best practices. 

You will likely know them as the Service Desk, Change Management, Configuration Management and Service Delivery teams, each with their own core responsibilities but together ensuring that IT delivers and runs services to a standard set of practices with the minimum of disruption to the rest of the organisation.

Service Management detection and challenges 

So what does service management actually entail? There are several practices and they vary from organisation to organisation but essentially you will have a group handling Incidents (interruptions to services that are unplanned or unexpected by the consumer of that service), Problems (looking at systemic issues within the IT Infrastructure and services), Change Management/Enablement (ensuring that change within the infrastructure and applications is undertaken in a coordinated fashion and with as little disruption to consumers as possible) and Configuration Management (Configuration Managers are responsible for ensuring that the IT estate is understood, provide a point of reference and documented, usually but not necessarily in a CMDB supporting the other teams in their goals).

For instance, at Cloudhouse, if an issue affects more than 50 people and persists for a long time, it is known as a ‘major incident.’ This term emphasises the urgency and scale of the issue; demanding immediate attention. When an issue persists and is not easily resolved, Service Management professionals begin a ‘problem investigation.’ This phase requires an examination of the technical infrastructure. The objective is to uncover the probable causes behind the issue or a series of related issues. 

Service Management teams work to determine where the issue started, what caused it, and how it has developed (if at all). The first step they need to take is to look over the last 24 hours; combing through recent changes and activity to pinpoint what might have triggered an error in the system. It could be due to a software update, a security breach or a software bug.

After sifting through the possibilities and once the Service Management teams have identified the cause, they then look into fixing it. Once they have identified a fix, they engage the Change Management/Enablement teams to identify the best time for implementation, while understanding the urgency, risk and approach for minimising impact to those unaffected. Additionally, the teams will ensure that the plans are in place to ensure the problem is not only resolved but also prevented from recurring.

The scenario above is of course a vastly simplified scenario and situations and conditions vary from organisation to organisation so your mileage may differ. However, as a high-level illustration, this is the general approach.

Simplifying Service Management

How can we help you enhance and enrich your Service Management processes? Cloudhouse Guardian is a configuration drift detection and management system that allows businesses to continuously monitor their entire system estate for updates and potential threats. As well as many other benefits, it allows your Service Management teams to have visibility over their systems and reduces the time taken to identify changes that have occurred within your estate. Ultimately cutting down the time to get an issue resolved and a customer back up and running. 

If you wish to discuss this topic further or just come and say hello, we will be at DTX Europe on the 4th and 5th of October – located in booth L30 in the ServiceDesk zone.

Not attending DTX Europe this year? Get in contact today, to discover how Cloudhouse can help you.