An overview of IBM Service Management

A. Ganek K. Kloeckner Information technology has become a key enabler for businesses in a wide variety of sectors (such as banking and health care) and is increasingly used to deliver their services. For these businesses, service excellence is increasingly a competitive differentiator, as customers need to rapidly adapt to changing conditions in the marketplace and create and deploy new services quickly and efficiently. However, service excellence can only be achieved through effective and efficient service management. IBM Service Management is an initiative to help businesses increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their services over the complete life cycle of service creation, deployment, and operations. IBM is bringing together the capabilities of its hardware, software, and consulting services organizations to help customers design, build, deploy, and manage these business services. IBM is also working closely with business partners and industry standards organizations to make this an industry-wide initiative. In this paper, we describe IBM Service Management and its role in improving all aspects of business services.