An Introduction to ServiceNow ITSM!

Hello, this is Mithun Prakash with QBrainX, and today I'd like to talk to you about what ITSM is so what is ITSM the definition of ITSM? according to Wikipedia is IT Service Management refers to the entirety of activities directed by policies organized and structured and processes and supporting procedures that are performed by an organization to design plan deliver operate and control information technology services offered to customers.

There are a lot of benefits to ITSM and I have some listed here some of them starting at the top enable collaboration across various teams and departments to establish well-defined IT processes that are repeatable and manageable empower teams to share knowledge and continuously improve efficiency of IT Help Desk.

Teams enable customer centricity with self-service functionality respond more quickly to major incidents and prevent them from reoccurring decrease overall cost for IT operations well-defined roles and responsibilities and clear expectations of service levels and availability if you have service level management with that said there are several different processes and/or applications that makeup ITSM. in this blog I'm going to share what ITSM is all about?

So the first one here is incident management the goal of the incident management process is to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained normal service operation is defined here as service operation within a service the level agreement now an SLA basically dictates it's an agreement between the business and the client on how what the percentage of that the applications stay up against it also is it also reflects when the service should be brought back up how long do you have if an incident occurs? if the service is down how long do you have to bring that back up and you could also have LA's which are operational level agreements and those can work between teams so each team can be designated an operational level agreement and that kind of dictates how long does a team have to work on that particular ticket before the Ola is breached.

The next process/application is Problem Management and problem management is the process responsible for managing the life cycle of all problems that happen or could happen in an IT service the primary objectives of problem management is to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening to eliminate reoccurring incidents and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented so what this means so a problem is often used when there's an incident or a number of incidents created for a particular issue that can't be resolved immediately they don't know they don't know how to resolve the issue you know helpdesk has tried to look at it they tried to work on it through you know on the phone with the user they can't they can't figure it out so and ultimately a problem is created and that can be tracked through that also you can create a known error once you know once that once it's a known error and there's maybe a workaround you can create a known error for with the problem and a root cause analysis etc

You can also, attach a change request or link a change request to the problem assuming let's say we have a workaround we have a solution for the problem and we want to submit a change request to fix the issue we can tie that into the problem right here.

The next process and application from a service perspective are change management and change management is defined as the process that ensures standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to control IT infrastructure in order to minimize the number and impact of any related incidents upon service this could include the addition of new hardware-software code updates and patches so what this is this basically is a control structure for anything anytime a change needs to happen in an in a production environment a change a request is created and it goes through an approval process can have any number of approvals from the application owners to the cab approvals etc and once all of those have been created there is a start and end plan date of when that change will occur in the system and there may be a number of tasks generated for each of the fulfillment teams for handling that work.

The next process/application is an asset management and asset management is the process of deploying operating maintaining upgrading and disposing of assets cost-effectively in a nutshell asset management ensures that all assets tangible and intangible are tracked and being used in an organization so basically, this accounts for servers computers laptops anything that the the system owns and has a serial number whether it's in use the asset tag who it's assigned to etc etc so this tracks all assets in an organization another the process which is commonly used is called service request management service request management is the process of handling customer service requests to applications hardware updates software enhancements password resets etc and includes any variety of requests that can be repeatable and possibly automated this allows customers to make service requests via a front-end or other similar mechanism without involving Service Desk so this is for this is essentially for automating repeatable requests that users may they may want to monitor, they may want a computer or iPhone or something so they can they can go out to a portal or a website and they can navigate to the request itself and they can order the request and you can set it up on the back end to have any number of approvals so if it's over a certain amount of money you can require the manager approval or other additional approvals on top of that and then after it's approved you can create some additional tasks fulfillment tasks that are assigned to specific teams this this keeps this keeps service desk out of the picture so you don't have to the customers don't have to keep calling service desk for things that really aren't issues there are more requests of items and like applications things like that.

And finally, knowledge management is the process of creating sharing using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge so this is sharing knowledge it says you can create knowledge articles in ServiceNow. we have a couple of other applications in the ITSM the process so caused by change so if if someone calls in and reports an incident you can find out if it was caused a specific change and if it was caused by a specific change over the weekend then you'd put that here and then you can you can ultimately assign a change request to it there as well and you can also link it to a problem so a problem is what you create if the incident wasn't immediately resolved by the help desk agent needs more investigation maybe there are additional incidents created for it so you can also like to change requests to this - once the resolution is found you can also there's also a related lists down at the bottom of the problem form for incidents and problem tasks and outages etc so you can link back all of the incidents that were open for that particular problem likewise our changes to problems and incidents and the change is ultimately it's either the cause by which is what caused the issue or a change request to resolve the issue or problem. the assigned group was hardware for this particular case and then once that is approved it goes over to cab approval and they will approve it etc.

So this is created once a resolution is found and assuming an incident was created and a problem was created and they found a solution or a workaround they create a change request and all of this can be tied into each other knowledge management so this is a these are different KB articles and what we can do here is you can see once you if you've got the proper permissions you can create KB articles and you can assign them to a specific knowledge base you can have several different knowledge bases our knowledge base is within a service now and provide different access levels - depending on the groups and once they access them you what they'll look like they'll have a link and they can open up the article it'll look like this and you can have any variety of different HTML and things like that to display the information so this is meant to kind of help users get the information they need having to call in a service desk it's kind of that deflection incident deflection.

And finally well there's asset let's look at asset so assets this is asset management so this is where I was discussing with you about the tracking of different hardware so these could be any number of things like this one is in Mac Apple MacBook Pro 15 inch it can track keyboards mice everything that's tangible intangible you can also track intellectual property or whatnot anything that's a value to the organization see a serial number. Cetera the data was assigned installed if it applies in the company any number and there's a bunch of different tabs financial tab disposal tab depreciation contracts and items activities etc.

So it has a whole slew of different fields that are relevant to assets and with service request management you can create catalog items which can be shown on a service portal so an example of a particular catalog item as you can see here Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and you can order now these are these are generally a lot more they're a little bit more complex you can have fields here for requested for requested by etc you can have questions and what I'll result will be a ticket on the backend much like this would be but it would have all of those variables displayed for the FULFILLER to see and there would be approvals and whatnot and tasks generated for the for the FULFILLER and this is generally you can have the kit you can maintain you can view this inside for service now users you can maintain a service catalog internally or you can use a portal and this is what a typical portal looks like so if a user comes out here if they're not using ITSM and users can come here and they can request something and  you can request backup office desktop whatever whatever you want to create for a catalog item you can throw it in these different categories and display them that way so it's a little easier for people to navigate and find so. let's say somebody wants to order an executive desktop they can click out here and they can order that they can you know to select the memory they need and whatnot so this is really nice in that it kind of controls it keeps people from calling service to ask asking for these things it's contained in the structure where it's got approvals and tasks and stuff on the backend and it's very nice to to have this out there for end-users and that that covers pretty much ITSM there are a number of applications there's a little bit more there are more things that encompass ITSM there's like there's configuration management that ties into it and we can get it we can get into that another time but these are the main themes or processes slash applications that makeup ITSM and how the company runs their business I hope this has helped you and thank you very much