itSMFI 2016 Forum Focus - September Forum Focus ITSMFI Sept 2016 | Page 6

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Monitoring network, hardware, and application
availability – it’s event management
Planning for future changes based on new
technologies or changes in demand – it’s
capacity management or even demand
management
Many of your existing IT activities will map across to
ITSM.
However, the difference between your current IT
activities and formalized ITSM might be that:
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Activities are inconsistently undertaken – often
only when time allows
Processes aren’t formalized and interconnected
6 itSMFI Forum Focus—September 2016
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where appropriate
Processes haven’t accommodated industry best
practice where available
Activities might be manually intensive, without
the aid of fit-for-purpose ITSM technology
So the adoption of ITSM might not always provide you
with new activities, but it should always give you good,
or best practice, advice on how to optimize your ITSM
activities.
The Origins of ITSM
Many will point to the introduction of ITIL in 1989, with
a set of best practice books, as the starting point for
ITSM. However, there was much that preceded ITIL that
could be considered ITSM – from both inside and outside
the IT community.
So ITSM and service management is older than ITIL,
although the term “IT service management” was not
commonly used pre-ITIL. Much of the early IT-based
ITSM thinking (albeit often referred to as IT operations
or similar), and support, came from technology vendors/
suppliers through the need to help their customers to use
their technology. For example, in early large-scale main-
frame environments it would be common to find