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IT Service Management (ITSM) is a crucial practice in today’s industry, aligning IT services with business objectives to deliver high-quality, cost-effective and efficient solutions. Businesses rely on ITSM software tools to support activities across the entire ITSM lifecycle, ensuring seamless service management. These tools help rationalize operations and service delivery to improve productivity.
ITSM tools have a direct impact on the user and customer experience, service quality, efficiency and its potential to scale. It is very important to choose the tool with the right features required by your organization. Investing in an ITSM tool is a significant decision, and it’s essential to choose one that meets future needs. The glaring question is – “Which one should you select out of a plethora of tools in the market”. This blog aims to aid your decision-making by highlighting essential features to consider when evaluating ITSM tools.
“Which one should you select out of a plethora of tools in the market”.
Getting to Know Your Starting Point
Every organization has a different starting point in its ITSM journey. Whether you’re just beginning to formalize service management practices or looking to refine an established system, your context will influence which tool capabilities are suitable and relevant.
Understanding your specific environment is the first step toward a successful tool selection, we can do it just by asking the following questions:
What are our daily pain points in Business and IT operations?
Where do we see the biggest opportunities to improve service delivery, user experience or operational efficiency?
What are the stakeholders or users and what are their needs from the tool?
Once you have established a clear understanding of your organization’s current state and needs, the next step is to evaluate the key features that will support your ITSM goals. Not all ITSM solutions are the same, hence focusing on the features that align with your operational challenges and growth aspirations is essential. An effective ITSM tool should not only address your immediate issues, but also scale with your organization as it evolves.
Key desired features in an ITSM tool
This section highlights key ITSM tool features that you should look for.
Incident management: Capability to manage and resolve incidents within SLAs. Features should include:
• Incident logging and categorization
• Automated workflows and escalation paths
• Service level agreement (SLA) tracking and compliance
• Self-service portal for users to log incidents and view the status
Problem management: Help to identify the root cause of recurring incidents and prevent their recurrence.
• Problem identification, investigation and resolution
• Root cause analysis tools
• Integration with incident management for historical data correlation
• Known error database (KEDB) for storing known issues and solutions
Change management: Ability to handle Change Management Lifecycle with automation so that changes to systems are delivered with minimal disruption.
• Change request creation and approval workflows
• Risk assessment and impact analysis
• Change scheduling and communication tools
• Change audit and reporting capabilities
IT Asset Management & Configuration management database (CMDB): Comprehensive, up-to-date database of all IT assets, their relationships and dependencies.
• Automated discovery of assets
• Relationship mapping between services, systems and configurations
• Integration with incident, problem and change management
Service catalogue: Feature providing detailed list of available IT services and request processes.
• Service offerings with descriptions and SLAs
• Integration with request management for automatic fulfilment
• User-friendly interface for browsing and requesting services
Knowledge management: Central repository for storing, sharing and accessing knowledge articles.
• Searchable knowledge base for IT support agents and users
• Version control and approval workflows
• Access control for different levels of user permissions (e.g. agent vs. customer)
• Integration with incident, problem and change management
Automation and AI: Automate repetitive tasks and utilize AI for proactive incident management.
• Automated incident creation (e.g. from events), routing and prioritization
• AI-based anomaly detection and ticket classification
• Virtual agents for 24/7 support
Reporting visualization and dashboard: Tools should enable data-driven decision-making through real-time reports, predictive analytics, dashboards via intuitive bar charts.
• Dashboards showing key performance indicators (KPIs)
• SLA compliance tracking and trend analysis
• Root cause analysis reports and recurring issue identification
Interoperability, integration capabilities: Plugins to integrate with industry grade standard tools like Jenkins, Harness, Salesforce, MuleSoft etc. This allows the tool to facilitate capabilities like:
• Monitoring and Alerting tools for advanced IM
• Automated quality and security gates
• Automation in inventory, procurement and AM
• Integration with Back Office and other systems within the organization
• Trigger notifications via various channels
Security and Compliance: Key security features like data encryption at rest and in transit, auto healing and patching, role-based access, DDOS and cyber resilience. Tools should be compliant with international and local regulatory bodies and certified for standard compliance regulations like PCI-DSS, SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, ITIL etc. to cater for supporting operations across geographies for various industries. This feature includes auditing, which ensures IT teams can track changes and maintain accountability. Another key feature is the ability to monitor user activity, keeping a tab on access control changes, login attempts.
Multi-device capabilities: Responsive design and native app capabilities for handheld devices are desired in modern day tools to support today’s hybrid nature of work.
Self-service portal: Allows users to resolve issues independently without contacting IT.
• Knowledge articles, FAQs and automated workflows for self-resolution
• Service catalogue for easy access to IT services
• Chatbots or virtual assistants for simple troubleshooting
User customization: Allows users to customize ITSM tools to some extent.
• Custom visualization modifies dashboards, menu
• Custom reports and add additional information
• UI customization such as modify theme, logos etc.
• Workflow customization
If you want to learn more about the functionality needed to support the ITIL practices, please refer to the ITIL practice guides available through the PeopleCert Plus subscription. Each practice guide provides:
A set of classes of automation solutions typically needed to support a specific practice (see Table 5.1), such as “Workflow and Task Management Tools,” “CI/CD Tools,” or “Discovery and Inventory Tools.” In total, there are 38 functionality classes supporting 34 ITIL practices, connected through many-to-many relationships.
A list of features that the automation solutions should provide to support specific activities of the processes incorporated into the ITIL practices (see table 5.2), such as “Capacity and performance modelling and calculation”, “Providing information about costs and cost drivers”, or “Visualization of metrics and their relations”.
Actionable recommendations for practice automation.
Conclusion
Features to look at in ITSM tools is not just about technology — it is about enabling excellent service to our user or customer and driving continuous improvement across the organization. By aligning the features with your operational goals and business needs, it becomes a trigger for agility, efficiency, and long-term resilience in your IT service environment
For more insights and expert guidance, explore ITIL-aligned ITSM tools and PeopleCert ITIL certifications.