ITSM, ITAM, ITOM: What is the difference?

Matthieu de Montvallon (CTO of ServiceNow France, one of the largest publishers of IT service management) clearly and accurately explained the difference between IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Asset Management (ITAM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM).

These three areas are very close, but very different. At the same time they are complementary. Description.

Note: This article is an excerpt from an interview with Matthieu de Montvallon published in the “Applications and Data” magazine on this page, which also involves cloud adoption.

A&D (LeMagIT): Can you define the exact scope of ITSM? Some people say “IT CRM”, others say “ERP for the IT department”. how are you today?

Matthieu de Montvallon: For me, it’s neither. Then I want to say, ITSM has no absolute definition. ITSM is a bit general. We put all service management processes that affect IT into it.

Some publishers limit ITSM to “service management.” “Asset Management” section [NDR : PC, smartphones, serveurs, etc.] Not one of them. In contrast, at ServiceNow, we include all processes involved in the day-to-day management of IT-thus including asset management, which manages procurement, inventory, equipment life cycle, and financial management of assets until disposal.

For us, ITSM is service management, asset management, its procurement management is linked to IT (procurement), and all the supporting parts of ITIL-even if this is no longer fashionable. (Issues, incidents, changes, management of “requests” and requests, management of “release management”, etc.).

A&D: What you describe is almost IT ERP?

MdM: The reason I don’t talk about IT ERP is that once we go beyond the scope of the process and turn to operational tools (such as infrastructure), there will be no more information from ITSM. For example, it is business process or “incident management”. It is no longer ITSM: it is ITOM (IT Operations Management).

Both are complementary to these processes on the one hand (ITSM), and on the other hand to the armed sector of these processes (ITOM). These are the two ERPs we can call IT.

But this definition is becoming meaningless. The boundaries are constantly evolving. Obviously, we are moving towards a broad IT concept. We have not mentioned ITSM Village, ITAM Village, ITOM Village, ITBM (IT Business Management) Village. Finally, all of these are IT.

A&D: I am a user of the company. When did I not know the connection with ITSM tools?

MdM: I have IT needs or IT problems.

I need a new mobile phone or a PC. I go to the company portal, which opens a catalog where I can find my property and place an order. It is ITSM.

I have a problem: I can no longer access my mailbox. I need to report it (it may become an incident with ITIL). I opened the intervention ticket: I triggered ITSM.

A&D: Just to be clear, is ITSM far behind buying?

MdM: Indeed, ITSM will not make purchases. ITSM understood and reformulated the request so that Purchasing and Procurement can understand it. We give them a PO (purchase order) from IT so that SAP (Ariba) or other tools can edit purchase orders, send invoices, etc. This part is completely beyond ITSM.