An Overview of IT Service Management (ITSM) in ServiceNow

An Overview of IT Service Management (ITSM) in ServiceNow

Published in Apps on , last updated .

Information Technology Service Management, also known as ITSM, refers to services or software that acts as a backbone for IT operations in any modern business. In other words, if you’ve ever struggled with frustrating delays related to computer problems at work, you can think of ITSM as a process designed to mitigate those issues. It’s the system running smoothly in the background that keeps your business’s tech running as intended. With the rapid rise in global competition in the tech sector especially, teams today rely on efficient ITSM experiences more than ever before.

One of the most popular tools for implementing ITSM today is ServiceNow. ServiceNow ITSM consolidates IT services and tools into one platform, maximizing productivity. This article will give you an overview of ITSM in ServiceNow with details on available modules and packages.

Source: ServiceNow

In this article

Why choose ServiceNow ITSM?

ServiceNow boasts a “people first” approach to ITSM. Focusing onIT service management in ServiceNow (or Jira Service Management) yourself takes away valuable time better spent working on high-level, job-specific tasks. Automating IT with ITSM frees up your time for work that matters and streamlines complicated IT processes and procedures.

This approach has paid off; ServiceNow has ranked in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management for over eight years. In 2022, ServiceNow ranked among the top leaders of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management programs.

Businesses also choose ServiceNow ITSM for tangible results:

According to this Forrester report on ServiceNow, the composite organization studied achieved the following results through ITSM:

  • Boosted IT Productivity: Saved $7.5 million through streamlined report generation, improved resource allocation, and service request automation.
  • Minimized Incident Impact: Reduced the financial impact of high-priority incidents by $3 million, slashing resolution times and preventing application outages.
  • Enhanced Employee Experience: Increased employee productivity by $1.4 million thanks to faster ticket resolution, self-service options, and overall satisfaction with IT support.
Source: Forrester

An expert’s take on ITSM

ITSM solutions, such as ServiceNow, don’t just fix IT problems; they transform how these teams and departments operate. Industry experts agree that a well-implemented ITSM solution leads to significant improvements across the board.

“The benefits of having all your operations on a single platform are everything from better reporting to improved insights and an overall better understanding of the value streams that serve crucial stakeholders. Better insights mean organizations can make iterative improvements to service delivery. But more than just insights, the ITSM/ESM platform can improve knowledge flow, connecting across teams and collaboration. Instead of information locked in functional silos, teams can query across the value stream to identify delay gates and new ways to innovate.”

Julie Mohr, Principal Analyst at Forrester
Source

In short, a platform like ServiceNow ITSM helps businesses get the most out of their technology investments, improving both efficiency and user experience. That’s why ServiceNow is trusted by major brands, including T-Mobile, Deloitte, Zoom, Accenture, and Syntax.

Now, let’s explore the key modules within ServiceNow that make these benefits possible…

ServiceNow ITSM Packages

ServiceNow offers dozens of modules broken down into three core ServiceNow packages to help you optimize your service management processes. Let’s review them to see which best suits your business needs.

Package 1: ITSM Standard

  • Ideal for: Growing businesses and smaller IT teams needing essential incident, problem, change, and request management capabilities. This gives you a solid foundation to manage IT workflows effectively.
  • Benefits: Streamline core IT service processes and establish a system of record for assets and cost management. The Walk-Up Experience offers a dedicated area to provide in-person support to improve user experiences.

Package 2: ITSM Pro

  • Ideal for: Scaling businesses focused on automation and self-service. ITSM Pro is for teams wanting to reduce manual tasks and empower users to solve issues independently.
  • Benefits: Predictive Intelligence helps you address issues before they become major disruptions. Automate repetitive tasks and drive self-service adoption. Performance Analytics gives deeper insights into service desk performance to drive continuous improvement.

Package 3: ITSM Enterprise

  • Ideal for: Large enterprises seeking maximum process optimization, cost control, and operational speed. This package is best for IT teams with complex processes, multiple stakeholders, or stringent compliance requirements.
  • Benefits: Optimize team resources with Workforce Optimization and delve deeper into processes with Process Mining. Drive down costs, improve vendor relationships, and streamline IT operations at scale.
Source: Microsoft

List of ServiceNow ITSM Modules

These modules cover a variety of applications and capabilities that can be customized and adjusted to your needs:

  • Now Assist: An AI-driven virtual assistant that allows employees to self-serve for support related to password resets, knowledge articles, and raising incidents or requests.
    • Who it’s for: Employees and IT support staff
    • Why consider: Reduces ticket volume for IT, empowers employees to find solutions independently, leading to faster resolutions and increased service desk efficiency.
  • Configuration Management Database (CMDB): A central repository for all IT infrastructure components (hardware, software, network devices, etc.) and their relationships.
    • Who it’s for: IT support staff, infrastructure teams, change management
    • Why consider: Provides a foundational view of the IT environment, enabling effective incident resolution, problem analysis, change impact assessment, and asset management.
  • Knowledge Management A structured knowledge base for storing and sharing troubleshooting tips, FAQs, and best practices.
    • Who it’s for: Employees and IT support staff
    • Why consider: Facilitates knowledge sharing, promotes self-service, reduces repetitive queries, and improves internal knowledge consistency.
  • Incident Management: Tracks and manages disruptions to IT services, aiming to restore operations as quickly as possible.
    • Who it’s for: IT support staff
    • Why consider: Streamlines and standardizes incident handling, improves incident response time, and allows for incident trend analysis for proactive prevention.
  • Change Management: Ensures changes to IT infrastructure are implemented in a controlled and authorized manner.
    • Who it’s for: IT support staff, change managers, infrastructure teams
    • Why consider: Reduces the risk of incidents caused by poorly planned changes, minimizes downtime incurred during changes, and improves coordination across IT teams.
  • Virtual Agent: Chatbot for automating conversations and resolving common requests/incidents.
    • Who it’s for: Employees and IT support staff
    • Why consider: Provides 24/7 support, deflects common tickets, and improves the user experience.
  • Predictive Intelligence: Uses machine learning to categorize, route, and predict the potential for issues or risks based on historical data.
    • Who it’s for: IT support staff, problem managers
    • Why consider: Reduces time spent on manual tasks, prevents incidents, and prioritizes work based on potential impact.
  • Service Operations Workspace: Modern workspace for IT support agents with advanced tools and visual layout for better ticket routing and resolution.
    • Who it’s for: IT support staff
    • Why consider: Streamlined UI, improves productivity, and allows agents to work on multiple cases faster.
  • Now Mobile: Offers a native mobile app for accessing core ServiceNow features on the go.
    • Who it’s for: Employees and IT support staff
    • Why consider: Enhances mobile accessibility for approvals, ticket updates, and self-service.
  • Digital Portfolio Management: Provides a project and portfolio management view for IT, aligning investments with business goals and strategies.
    • Who it’s for: IT leadership, project managers
    • Why consider: Centralizes IT project data, improves decision making, and links IT spend to business value.
  • DevOps Change Velocity: Manages the speed and integrity of software changes for businesses using DevOps practices.
    • Who it’s for: Developers, IT operations, release managers
    • Why consider: Increases release frequency safely, provides analytics and insights on the DevOps pipeline, and promotes collaboration between development and operations teams.
  • Employee Center: A unified portal for employees to access HR, IT, and other company services/resources.
    • Who it’s for: All employees
    • Why consider: Centralizes employee needs in a modern interface, boosts self-service across departments, and provides personalized experiences.
  • Service Portal: Similar to Employee Center, Service Portal is a user-facing interface for requesting IT services, accessing knowledge, and tracking the status of requests or incidents.
    • Who it’s for: Employees and customers seeking support
    • Why consider: Consumer-like experience, promotes IT self-service, and allows for customization to match your organization’s branding.
  • Problem Management: Seeks to find the root cause of recurring incidents, preventing them from happening in the future.
    • Who it’s for: IT support staff, particularly problem managers
    • Why consider: Proactive problem resolution reduces incident volume over time, improves service availability, and frees up IT resources.
  • Service Catalog: An online storefront where users can request predefined IT services like software installations, hardware provisioning, or account setups.
    • Who it’s for: Employees needing IT goods or services
    • Why consider: Standardized ordering process, improves efficiency for common requests, and provides transparency into the IT service offerings.
  • Asset Management: Tracks all hardware, software, and cloud assets throughout their lifecycle, including ownership, financial information, and contracts.
    • Who it’s for: IT asset managers, finance, procurement
    • Why consider: Helps optimize usage and costs of assets, enables informed procurement decisions, and ensures software license compliance.
  • Workforce Optimization: Uses data and analytics to manage the deployment and productivity of your IT support workforce.
    • Who it’s for: IT service desk managers, workforce planners
    • Why consider: Proactive staffing for workload shifts, optimizes skill assignments, and identifies training needs for improved efficiency.
  • Process Mining: Analyzes process data within ServiceNow instances to discover bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and non-compliance.
    • Who it’s for: Process owners, IT leadership
    • Why consider: Facilitates data-driven process improvement, enables visualization of complex process flows, and identifies areas for automation.
  • Contract and Renewal Management: A central repository for tracking contracts and their renewal dates.
    • Who it’s for: Finance, procurement, legal, IT teams
    • Why consider: Improves visibility into contract spending and timelines, enables better negotiation, and prevents service lapses from missed renewals.
  • Continual Improvement Management: Provides structured methodologies for finding and prioritizing improvements across IT services.
    • Who it’s for: Process owners, IT leadership
    • Why consider: Fosters a culture of continuous improvement, ensures that IT efforts align with business needs, and enables reporting on improvement initiatives.
  • Site Reliability Operations (SRE): Focused on the reliability and performance of applications and services, with an engineering focus.
    • Who it’s for: SRE teams, IT operations
    • Why consider: Enables data-driven approach to system reliability, promotes automation to reduce toil, and helps define service-level objectives (SLOs).
  • DevOps Config: Manages configuration data associated with DevOps practices across development, testing, and production.
    • Who it’s for: Developers, IT operations
    • Why consider: Centralized configuration management promotes consistency and ensures auditability within the DevOps ecosystem.
  • Request Management: Handles general user requests for information or resources (not necessarily incident or service-related).
    • Who it’s for: IT teams, other departments
    • Why consider: Streamlines and tracks all types of user requests.
  • Service Level Management (SLM): Defines, monitors, and reports on service level agreements (SLAs) between IT and the business.
    • Who it’s for: IT service managers, IT leadership
    • Why consider: Sets clear performance expectations, ensures service quality alignment.

Key Considerations for your own ServiceNow package:

  • Team Size & Roles: Evaluate team size, roles involved in service management, and existing levels of automation or self-service.
  • IT Complexity: The complexity of your IT environment and the number of systems you manage will impact your package choice.
  • Future Scalability: Think ahead – how much do you expect your business to grow, or your IT needs to evolve in the near future?
  • Cost: ServiceNow can be an investment, particularly the Pro and Enterprise packages. Consider potential ROI carefully against your budget.
  • Complexity: ITSM Pro and Enterprise packages introduce additional features, which can increase the learning curve and implementation time.

ServiceNow ITSM Efficiencies & Benefits

Without ITSM, you lose time, resources, and money. Your problem-solving process is inefficient, leaving employees and customers frustrated and dissatisfied. A lack of ITSM can also lead to accountability and compliance concerns and put you at a higher risk of security breaches. ServiceNow ITSM provides you peace of mind and lets you: 

  • Self-solve issues 24/7 and eliminate wait times
  • Automate services with continuous improvement and AI 
  • Collaborate to resolve incidents and find answers quickly. 

Use Case: Collaboration between IT and Engineering

Picture this: A critical customer-facing application crashes. Your IT service desk is flooded with support tickets. The root cause turns out to be a recent code change that hasn’t been deployed correctly. With ServiceNow and Unito’s 2-way integration, your IT and Development teams can:

  • Automate Jira Issue Creation: The IT support agent escalates the ServiceNow incident seamlessly, and a corresponding issue is automatically created in Jira for the development team, including all relevant diagnostic details.
  • Real-time Collaboration: Changes to the status of the Jira issue update the ServiceNow incident and vice-versa, keeping both teams informed. Developers and IT staff can even comment directly within each other’s systems.
  • Swift Resolution: Engineering fixes the bug and deploys the update. Once confirmed in Jira, the ServiceNow incident is resolved, and automated notifications keep impacted users in the loop.

Watch a demo integration between ServiceNow and Jira

Find out more about Unito’s integration for Jira and ServiceNow

Use Case: Expanded Incident Creation with Predictive Intelligence

Predictive Intelligence‘s ticket triage, classification and routing, as well as incident detection ensure snew tickets land with the right team immediately, empowering your IT staff to take swift, informed action based on detailed incidents.

Paired with Unito, you could set up an even more sophisticated incident triage and assignment process:

  • ServiceNow triages and categorizes the incident automatically.
  • The ticket is then assigned to the appropriate IT service team for investigation and resolution. If that team member works outside of ServiceNow (perhaps in Azure DevOps); Unito then jumps in to create a mirrored work item in ADO.
  • The work item in ADO is then kept in 2-way sync with the original incident in ServiceNow. As the team in ADO updates everyone else on their progress, the ServiceNow incident updates automatically as well.

The future of ServiceNow and ITSM

Without ITSM, you risk the chance of security breaches, disorganization, financial drain, lack of efficiency, and employee and customer dissatisfaction. Integrating ITSM can help you thrive. Optimizing ITSM can help workflows and enhance the employee and customer experience, providing time to focus on what matters.

A quote from Brian Solis, Head of Innovation at ServiceNow, stating the need to rethink how businesses understand how technology transforms organizations for a new future. It emphasizes that technology leaders must redefine their roles beyond IT to drive business innovation.
  • AI-Powered Automation: Expect ServiceNow to deeply integrate AI and machine learning for enhanced automation throughout ITSM workflows. This will streamline tasks, predict potential issues, and free up IT teams for strategic projects.
  • Hyperautomation: ServiceNow platforms will increasingly tailor experiences based on user roles, needs, and past interactions. This leads to higher self-service success rates, faster issue resolution, and more satisfied employees and customers. It’s already begun with the introduction of ServiceNow’s focus on Hyperautomation.
  • Focus on Employee Experience: ITSM will shift beyond technical troubleshooting to encompass the entire employee experience. ServiceNow’s efforts to boost employee experience will be led by tools that simplify onboarding, knowledge management, and cross-departmental collaboration, all within the ITSM ecosystem.
  • Rise of the Service Platform: The future of IoT cloud services will see ServiceNow become an even more critical, central service delivery platform, extending beyond IT. Expect integrations that allow HR, Facilities, and other departments to leverage the same ITSM framework, boosting enterprise-wide efficiency.
  • The Cloud and Low-Code: Continued emphasis on cloud-based solutions and customization will empower businesses of all sizes to tailor ServiceNow and ITSM to their specific needs. How will they get there? Low-code will work for some, but the future belongs to no-code and 2-way sync.

When it comes to integrating Servicenow: there’s Integration Hub for those who prefer low-code, and Unito for those who prefer a simpler approach to integration powered by live 2-way sync.

Try Unito for 14 days, absolutely free.

Try it free