Key Criteria for Evaluating IT Service Management (ITSM) Solutionsv2.0

1. Summary

Today’s businesses are more dependent upon their IT departments than ever. The expectation is that IT will provide the necessary services and solutions to the business, whether that means providing access to mission-critical applications or ensuring uptime of customer-facing portals and processes. Information technology service management (ITSM) focuses on continuously improving the quality and reliability of these services and products offered to a business and its customers. Key to this endeavor is enabling an unobstructed view of IT capabilities such as:

• Transparency of current IT services and potential impacts of change on their value and availability.
• Improved flexibility through better collaboration with the business.
• Reduced mean time to repair (MTTR) when incidents occur.
• Improved user and employee experience and better outcomes for all.
• Faster cycle time for changes and shortened time to market (TTM) for business initiatives.

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.

Operational size and scope matters in considering a solution. The entire ITIL framework may prove daunting and unnecessary to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), yet the adoption of an ITIL-based solution offers a pathway and support for growth and expansion. For larger SMBs or departmental use cases, IT operations teams need at least functionality for event, incident, change/release, and major incident management. As the SMB or department grows, it can then build on its core ITIL-framework foundation. Large IT organizations benefit from the entire ITIL 3 or ITIL 4 set frameworks.

This is the second year that GigaOm has reported on the ITSM landscape and the need for IT to provide quality services to their organizations. While this year’s report builds on the research done for GigaOm’s first ITSM report, it now provides detailed focus and analysis of the market’s transition from ITIL 3 to ITIL 4 in the context of buyers’ and vendors’ movement towards best practices deployment.

This GigaOm Key Criteria and Radar report provides an overview of vendors committed to certification of ITIL 3 and ITIL 4 for the ITSM market. Additionally, the report identifies capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technology) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting a best practices-oriented ITSM solution, and details vendors and products that excel and are committed to supporting customers on their own adoption path for ITIL 4. These reports give prospective buyers an overview of the top vendors in this sector and help decision-makers evaluate solutions that align with organizational priorities to decide where to invest.