GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating IT Service Management (ITSM) Solutionsv3.0

1. Executive Summary

Information technology service management (ITSM) is a solution that helps organizations define, provision, support, and deliver IT services throughout a company and beyond. It is important to businesses as they become increasingly reliant on IT departments and technologies as foundational components of their products and delivery to the market. The expectation is that IT will provide services and solutions to support every need, from providing access to mission-critical back office applications to ensuring uptime of customer-facing portals and processes. ITSM is designed to ensure the quality and reliability of these services and products.

The underpinnings of an ITSM solution are broad and provide IT teams with transparent insight into current IT services and the potential impacts of change on their value and availability. Similarly, ITSM improves flexibility through better collaboration with the business side while creating a highly visible IT discipline. It enables IT to reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) when incidents occur, thereby improving user experiences and creating better outcomes.

Selecting an ITSM solution is a multifaceted undertaking that should consider the size of the organization, its IT maturity, and the future development of both the business and its IT systems. The use of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, processes, and practices provides both guidance and a structure for assessing and selecting an ITSM solution, enabling businesses to deploy that solution with confidence. This report focuses on ITIL 4 certification and solutions.

Business Imperative
ITSM matters to a wide-ranging audience, including IT technical staff and management, C-suite executives, and department heads seeking to manage business services. All stakeholders have service visibility through a variety of views. Executives have visibility into ITSM and its relative success. For IT teams, ITSM is crucial for avoiding business- or revenue-impacting downtime. ITSM is generally applied across all vertical market segments, though it can be customized internally within some departments outside of IT. C-suite executives will appreciate the ability to manage service quality and uptime of all IT and business services, along with insight and analytics for all IT services and supporting asset mapping.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an ITSM solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of an ITSM solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.2 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that an ITSM solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for ITSM are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for ITSM

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the ITSM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective ITSM solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading ITSM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.