Supporting Tech Support: An IT Service Management Primer

IT service management, or ITSM, is all about optimizing a business's efficiency internally as well as externally by improving information management processes. Whether you're just a small business trying to set up an effective help desk, or you're building a full-blown tech support team, it is worth understanding the benefits of improving your team's focus on service management when dealing with vendors, customers, or other external users of your IT products and services.

ITIL Certifications

The IT Infrastructure Library is the greater semantic umbrella under which ITSM languishes and basically encompasses all of IT best practices. To educate and train staff on proper, systematic, process-oriented methods that will allow them to greatly improve problem resolution and reduce call-backs, you can put them through a program for ITIL certification. However, being able to ask the right questions is only half the battle. IT staff also need access to a large amount of concise and easily accessible data in order to make sense of the problems that they're dealing with. And in order to provide effective services, we need to examine the two major consumer groups of IT services: internal and external consumers.

Internal

Internal consumers are the different departments that make up your organization. It's IT's responsibility to make sure that all of the different departments are properly integrated with each other. This means ensuring that everyone can access all of the information and software that they need to do their jobs - anything from QA compliance issues to tracking shipments for production to keeping track of expenditures is within IT's realm of responsibility along with the actual departments in charge of those things. IT is ...