IT MANAGEMENT

IT Management

IT Management

Introduction

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a term that is used to describe the management and implementation of quality services in various IT domains. Through these management principles, we aim to improve the structure and processes involved in the IT services. The business functions of any organization have a lot of expectations from the IT departments to streamline the services in order to improve the responsiveness in the changing business environment. Furthermore, the customers expect the availability, quality and robustness of the services (Whittleston 2008, p.2). This posses many challenges to IT organizations as they have to find a balance between designing IT services to enable businesses to deliver fast product development and flexibility in design with embedded system and cost controls.

ITSM provides a set of clear defined processes that focus on the organization's IT needs. With these analytical processes, the people responsible for developing and managing these IT services can build robust and efficient IT services. These services are designed based on the purpose they are going to serve with a focus on time. This involves continuous improvement of IT services and requires change management at various steps of the process (IBM 2007, p.5). Here, we will study about the Change Management and the tools regarding change management involved in ITSM.

Discussion

Change Management

Change management serves as the gatekeeper to bringing control into the organization. This is because of the fact that many processes in the organization might have been outdated, or there are continuous problems reported due to the inefficiencies inherited in that process. Change management is responsible for protecting the services of any IT company from anything that can negatively affect its performance. A well designed and optimized change management process can result in fewer problems and bottlenecks, and makes sure that the customer requests are processed and corrected quickly (MMU n.d. p. 3-5).

In the midst of today's environment, it is becoming every so increasingly important to manage and implement change effectively. It is very important for business organizations to bring a balance between stability and flexibility requirements of its IT services. It is for this reason that IT companies have to introduce best practices into their whole organization by using change efforts. Those IT firms that are open to change by using an unbiased approach are able to deliver the required flexibility and agility required in the services industry today.

In our example, the IT help desk is not performing well and is facing difficulty to meet the expectations of the customers. This can be evident from the increase in the number of complaints from customers or the fact that there are inefficiencies in the system due to which it takes a long time to process their requests. These inefficiencies result in a loss of value to the company because the unsatisfied customers would not be using the services of the company. They might share their experiences with others as well thereby, resulting in an even greater loss to the company. This situation needs immediate attention and to ...