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IT Service Management (ITSM) is a strategic approach for designing, delivering, managing and improving the way IT is used and delivered within an organization. Typically, ITSM solutions are largely wrapped around how IT offers services to their internal customers. One of the more well-known ITSM providers is ServiceNow – it enables service management through an enterprise cloud suite.

According to Wikipedia:

ITSM tools are often marketed as ITSM suites, which support not one, but a whole set of ITSM processes. At their core is usually a workflow management system for handling incidents, service requests, problems and changes. The ability of these suites to enable easy linking between incident, service request, problem and change records with each other and with records of configuration items from the CMDB, can be a great advantage.

Over the past few years, Calero has seen an uptick in customers linking their TEM (Telecom Expense Management) solutions to their ITSM applications. Organizations that are making this move desire:

• A simple and proven solution that spans across all IT functions
• To view all their IT service activity through one lens
• Clear integration between the systems, workflow and processes that require service tickets, help desk support, etc.
• Deeper financial data-sets, pulled from the source-data (invoices, contracts, etc.) – not just the general ledger
• The ability to trigger and manage procurement, provisioning, and any other MACDs (moves, adds, changes and disconnects) in the TEM platform directly from within the ITSM solution
• Improved internal chargeback process so financial results related to labor and other charges can automatically be incorporated into an IT Bill of Services

Leading ITSM providers, like ServiceNow, have positioned themselves as more of a platform versus an application in recent years. As such, their value has shifted from being a “monolithic we do everything approach” towards being the “UI and workflow glue uniting multiple cloud systems.” It doesn’t take a big leap to see how TEM solutions fit into this vision for an integrated suite of cloud solutions. After all, many TEM solutions have shifted towards the cloud, and web services/APIs make this integration relatively seamless as part of an overall single view into your federation of systems.

Types of TEM/ITSM Automations to Expect with an Integration: (using ServiceNow as the example) 

• Bi-lateral integration (information moves back and forth between the two systems)
• Auto-populate service tickets in ServiceNow based on user authentication
• Asset and ownership information auto ticket updated upon closure
• Actual cost data is added to the IT cost reports and GL for the business management cost view in ServiceNow
• Domain specific pre-designed MACD workflows within the TEM solution are easily accessible to ServiceNow users
• Invoice and Expense information pulled directly into ServiceNow

Want to learn more about integration between TEM and ITSM? Check out our recent webcast from Calero World. This on-demand recording includes conversations from three current Calero/ServiceNow customers, and how they have approached this hot topic.