ITSM

ITSM, or IT Service Management, is the discipline of planning, delivering, operating, and supporting IT as a set of services to internal and external consumers. Rather than treating technology as isolated systems, ITSM treats it as a managed portfolio with defined service levels, request and incident handling, and clear ownership. It is the broader practice that frameworks like ITIL codify into specific processes.

• Service catalog - A defined list of the services IT offers and what consumers can expect from each.
• Incident and request management - Structured ways to report, triage, and resolve issues and fulfill requests.
• Change and release management - Controls for how services are modified without breaking what depends on them.
• Service levels and reporting - SLAs, metrics, and continual improvement tied to business outcomes.

In the API economy, ITSM is where APIs get treated as first-class services with owners, SLAs, and support paths rather than orphaned endpoints. Incident and change practices govern how outages and breaking versions are communicated, and the service catalog concept increasingly extends to internal API catalogs and developer portals. As organizations bring agents and automation into operations, ITSM’s structure around requests, changes, and service levels provides the guardrails that keep automated actions accountable and observable.