IT Service Management

Overview

Your IT department should not be considered a cost center. Today, it can be a business, driven by application demands. Rather than just managing technology components, your IT department should focus on managing service levels and performance.
 
We'll help you lower IT costs, and free up staff time. We take the time to get to know your business and help you meet your organizational and IT department goals by ensuring that our end-to-end solutions align with your strategic initiatives.
 
Our clients rely on us not only to implement new technologies, but to raise awareness, educate, and support an entire IT Service Management transformation on how people operate their day-to-day functions. Calling on our text book theory, we'll apply it to your real-world application, aligning your business with ITSM/ITIL best practices, and setting you up for a future of IT success.
 
Through utilizing world leading and recognized best-in-class enterprise technologies, particularly ServiceNow, our team at Concurrency is helping to change the way people work within their organizations.

More on ITSM

• What's the difference between ITSM and ITIL?

  IT service management or ITSM simply means how you manage your day to day IT services and processes and define the services that you offer to the business as an IT organization.
  Even if you’ve never heard the term ITSM, if you’re running IT systems, then you are probably doing some sort of ITSM. A typical IT service desk handles incidents and service requests, as well, as providing an interface to users for other ITSM activities such as incident management, problem management, configuration management, change management, release management and others.
  
  IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL is the name of the world’s most widely recognized framework for ITSM. ITIL is a registered trademark of AXELOS, which owns a range of best practice solutions and their corresponding publications and exams. ITIL has been adopted by many organizations, and there are millions of certified ITIL practitioners worldwide.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

• Core Tenants of Modern Management

  The following are the core tenants of Modern Management.
  • Defined: IT must define what it delivers to the business, why it is valuable, and what it costs, regardless of who deployed it or decided it was a good idea. 
  • ​Value: The applications we build or buy require a value-driven approach to managing the application lifecycle. 
  • Code: The transition that is occurring is that almost everything is "code" or a digital asset, whether it is infrastructure, configuration, or the application itself.  This state allows the asset to be version controlled, stored, validated, and secured. 
  • Cloud: The assumption for modern management is that IT is managing in a "cloud", which could be a public cloud, or an on-premise cloud.  A cloud may have servers, network devices, gateways, websites, etc. but they can always be "queried" from the cloud container.  This also includes SaaS based applications, which more and more can be "queried" vs. just tracked and managed.
  • Policies:  The Modern IT ecosystem will be one that continues to have policies, but those policies will declaratively implement a configuration state.  The Modern Management tooling is built to leverage a policy, to implement a control, necessary to protect the environment. 
  • Declarative: The biggest infrastructure difference in the Modern Management environment is that the configuration is declarative and idempotent.  A declarative configuration is one where you define as code an intended configuration and the configuration is then deployed to a target environment.  The state of indempotence is when that configuration is maintained and redeployed, regardless of manual changes made on the target system. 
  • Continuous: The most successful modern management is one that facilitates continuous deployment, meaning that the value is delivered to customers as soon as it is created. Enabling continuous deployment requires automation, declarative configuration, and continuous testing.  The automation of process activities, such as release management, allows for human activity to be removed from a process, allowing for a process to be streamlined.  The closer an organization gets to successful continuous deployment, the less errors exist within a process and the faster value can be provided.
  • Visible: The management of cloud-scale applications means that the way we "monitor" applications change.  The days of "sending alerts" to manually resolve errors are replaced with idempotent infrastructure, and continuous deployment.  These applications produce bugs and errors that need to be resolved and in order to understand them at cloud scale we need visibility.  Visibility lets us understand our system and build one which is self-maintaining in as "simple" of a manner as possible.  In a way, applications under modern management become less "intelligent" and more repeatable.
  • Feedback: The loop of error into our IT management space is as important as ever, but instead of more complicated we're going to make it more direct, faster, and more human-centric.  Modern IT is NOT automated IVRs, know-nothing help desks, and 6 month long requirements gathering sessions.  Feedback should be captured in appropriate channels, whether it is an incident or bug, and sent to the appropriate expert through as direct a channel as possible. The speed to execution is what Modern Management is all about, whether it is bugs, features, or incidents.
  • Requestable:  The management of an effective IT services makes it simple to understand and request to the stakeholder who is interested in it.  This has traditionally been provided through an IT service catalog, which continues to serve its purpose.  However, IT cannot assume it will always own the consumption layer and instead needs to build the necessary management into the operational process of each tool by gathering state vs. always controlling provisioning. In the end, IT services need to be both requestable and managed at the same time.