Gain a Complete IT View: Integrating ITSM with SAM

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David Graham, Principal Consultant, Certero

Originally posted in October 2017, revised in December 2019.

Do you spend more time than necessary trying to find the information you need? Is this impacting your responses to IT and service desk queries?

There is a common misconception that IT Service Management (ITSM) and the service desk are the same thing. ITSM actually offers a much broader scope, covering a variety of IT management capabilities related to service delivery and support, with the service desk forming a part of this. To properly manage both ITSM processes and service desk issues, access to IT data is critical for helping to improve fixing times and efficiency. However, there are limitations in accessing the necessary information.

The Challenges of ITSM and Data

While the service desk manages a number of issues, teams understand the importance of having access to complete and accurate information in order to manage such issues. This is where the importance of data within ITSM and the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) becomes prominent, offering a crucial area where service desk teams can access the information needed to solve and proactively prevent issues. Some organizations rely solely on ITSM to populate a CMDB, which can create a number of problems given the shear amount of data required.

These challenges can include:

• High impact on resources: the timely process to populate and maintain data from numerous sources
• Accuracy of data: data is often not managed dynamically therefore its accuracy relies on people to maintain
• Waste of resources: large amount of time spent extracting and manipulating data for reports

Integrating ITAM and ITSM

The integration of IT Asset Management (ITAM) and ITSM plays an important role in being able to understand the IT estate, which will significantly benefit IT managers, ITSM managers and service desk personnel. Such an integration allows for all specific hardware and software attributes of configuration items, such as computers, printers, switches or routers to be readily accessible to all users. To understand the IT estate, having detailed hardware and software inventory on hand can drastically improve efficiencies and productivity and helps to enhance processes set out in ITSM, including, but not limited to, request fulfilment, software deployment and change management. For example; tracking the progress of operating system migration projects becomes automated as ITAM provides all of the metrics required for accurate management.

With a central point for device and software information, organizations can drastically improve processes within ITSM as well as the workload of service desk teams.

The Certero RESTful API

Through the powerful OData protocol, the Certero API provides granular level data from any Certero solution in a convenient JSON format, allowing your team to share and manipulate your IT asset data for easier population of ITSM solutions, CMDB’s, Excel, Power BI and many more.

Are you considering integrating your ITSM with ITAN? Download the white paper – How can SAM Integrate with ITSM? – to find out how it can improve efficiency and productivity across the service desk and business.