The ITOM Journey: Building Operational Maturity

In today’s digital enterprise, IT operations are the engine that keeps everything moving. But like any engine it requires maintenance and care.  Performance depends on visibility, control, and continual tuning. That’s where IT Operations Management (ITOM) comes in and ServiceNow provides the platform to help organizations evolve from reactive firefighting to proactive, intelligent operations.
While taking the ITOM journey, you will travel through different stages of maturity.  In general, these stages look like this:

1. Visibility: Foundation
   1. Build a trustworthy CMDB via automatic population
   2. Utilize Discovery and Service Graph Connectors to populate
   3. Visualize relationships between CIs
2. Health: Management
   1. Maintain the CMDB via automated tools
   2. Monitor health dashboards for de-duplication tasks or stale cis
   3. Continue to add supported integration tools for overlapping data population
   4. Manage Identification and Reconciliation rules
3. Optimization: Incorporate CSDM
   1. Identify and create CSDM data (Business Applications, Service Instances, Business Services and Service Offerings)
   2. Utilize Service Mapping to create and maintain service maps
   3. Visualize impact at the service level
   4. Understand how outages effect the business
   5. Determine impact and risk against priority applications
4. Proactive Operations: Predict and Prevent
   1. Utilize Event Management and AIOps
   2. Reduce unwanted noise and correlate events into actionable alerts
   3. Identify root causes via AI based correlation
   4. Automatically identify impacted services and related cis
   5. Integrate with Incident Management for faster resolution times
5. Autonomous IT: Self Healing
   1. Automated remediation workflows can resolve or assist resolution without intervention
   2. CMDB remains healthy based on automated rules
   3. Orchestration provides appropriate actions against specific CIs

The ITOM journey isn’t a one-time project, it’s an evolution. Each stage builds upon the last, creating a more intelligent, connected, and resilient operational ecosystem.

The ITOM suite of application like: Discovery, Service Mapping, Event Management, Health Log Analytics and AIOps allows us to move through these stages systematically, unlocking greater efficiency, visibility, and business impact at every step.

The question isn’t whether your organization should begin the ITOM journey it’s how far you’re ready to go.