1.1.1 Role of service support in IT service management
The recent advances in information technology have made the effective use of IT assets an essential part of doing business. IT systems consisting of hardware, software, and the networks that bind them together are spreading at an unprecedented pace, growing ever larger and more complex year on year. The concept of IT service management meets this challenge head-on, supporting business operations and services by managing the operation of IT systems in a manner that seeks quality commensurate with the resources invested.
IT service management is a process-focused approach to IT system management that describes everything from the relationship between a system and its users to the staff and resources involved in its operation as units of activity called processes.
ITIL categorizes the core processes that underpin IT service management as service support and service delivery. Service support is concerned with how day-to-day issues such as user inquiries and system faults are quickly resolved. Service delivery is concerned with medium and long term ability to provide consistent services to users. Service support is described in greater detail below.
Generally, user inquiries and system faults that arise in the day-to-day operation of an IT system need to be dealt with quickly. Although it is important to make the appropriate workaround available as soon as possible, the root cause still needs to be found. The ensuing investigation may lead to suggestions for radical measures including changes to the systems involved. This can be too demanding a task for one team, and lead to delays in problem resolution.
One approach to problem resolution is to have separate processes for different tasks. For example, one process might present workarounds to the user, another might perform root cause investigation and present the solution to the user, and yet another might propose system changes and plans for their implementation. The end result is better efficiency and greater throughput.
The following figure shows this approach in an ITIL context.
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![[Figure]](GRAPHICS/ZU010100.GIF)
The processes in the ITIL framework are described below.
- Incident management
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User inquiries and events that threaten to disrupt normal system operation are managed as incidents. Incident management aims to ensure that queries are answered appropriately and workarounds are made available as soon as possible.
Incidents that are beyond the scope of the incident management process can be escalated to problem management.
- Problem management
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Problem management manages, as problems, user inquiries, system faults, and other matters that warrant further investigation. This process diagnoses the root cause of problems and identifies permanent solutions.
If feedback needs to be made to the incident management process, a request to that effect can be made. If problem management determines that a user document or the system itself needs changing, a request for change (RFC) can be raised and escalated to the change management process.
- Change management
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Change management is triggered by a request for change, and involves a careful assessment of potential changes and their implementation, taking into consideration the risk of system failures and the impact of the change on business operations. This assessment and the resulting proposal involve a team made up of people who have roles in the construction, operation, and use of the affected systems. In ITIL, these are called Change Advisory Board (CAB) members. The meetings at which CAB members assess the situation and come up with proposals are called Change Advisory Board (CAB) Meetings.
If the meeting results in a change plan, the plan is passed to the release management process to be implemented. The results of the RFC are also reported to the problem management process.
- Release management
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The release management process is responsible for establishing implementation plans based on proposed changes to affected systems. It is also responsible for building, testing, and deploying changes according to these implementation plans.
After implementing the changes, the release management team reports back to the change management and configuration management processes.
- Configuration management
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Configuration management is a process that manages the configuration information for managed systems. Configuration information consists of interrelated information about hardware, software, and other resources that can be made available to other processes as needed.
If the release management process results in a system change, the configuration management team is required to update the configuration information to reflect the change.