August 19, 2022 4 min read

ITIL Market Trends

ITOM and ITSM capabilities: their relative

positioning explained
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Author: Stephen Mann

This article will explore the relative positioning of ITOM and ITSM and what this means for
organizations.

Introduction
If your organization uses an IT service management (ITSM) tool, you will have probably seen
your ITSM tool vendor (or perhaps their competitors) promote their IT operations
management (ITOM) capabilities. Usually, as an add-on to the existing ITSM capabilities. It is
great that your ITSM tool now does more, but were you proactively looking for these ITOM
capabilities, before you learned how they could help your organization’s operations and
outcomes?

ITOM is a new opportunity that some may be unfamiliar with, requiring a quick internet
search to learn more. However, even Google struggles to explain ITOM. To help, this article
looks at the issues the IT industry has when defining ITOM and its impact on how ITOM is
positioned against ITSM.

Defining ITOM
The online Gartner Glossary states that:

‘Gartner defines IT operations as the people and management processes associated with IT
service management to deliver the right set of services at the right quality and at
competitive costs for customers.’

There is, however, no ITOM definition in the Gartner Glossary. But it does state that:

‘IT operations management (ITOM) software is intended to represent all the tools needed to
manage the provisioning, capacity, performance and availability of computing, networking
and application resources — as well as the overall quality, efficiency and experience of their
delivery.’

This technology-focused ITOM software definition reflects the IT industry’s issues with
defining ITOM. As a result, this affects how ITOM is positioned relative to ITSM. Without an
industry-accepted ITOM definition to quote, each ITOM solution vendor has its own view of
what ITOM is, which is usually based on its solutions’ capabilities.

How ITOM is positioned relative to ITSM

Perhaps begin by questioning whether ITOM actually exists as such. The Gartner Glossary
definitions above mentions IT operations and the ITOM software technology classification,
but it does not explicitly refer to ITOM (with the IT operations definition referencing ITSM).
This definition, as well as ITSM tool vendors increasingly adding ITOM capabilities to their
solutions, point to ITOM being a subset of ITSM (especially within ITIL® 4’s broader
coverage).
However, although some ITSM tool vendors might offer ITOM capabilities, some ITOM tool
vendors offer basic ITSM capabilities, such as help desk. Such that ITSM can be considered a
subset of ITOM or, more realistically, they are separate IT management disciplines with a
degree of overlap.

Thankfully, understanding common ITOM capabilities helps to understand the relationship

of ITOM to ITSM without an industry definition.

THE COMMON ITOM CAPABILITIES

As already mentioned, different ITOM tool vendors will have different ITOM definitions,
based on their ITOM tools. Hence, there is not a single agreed list of what an ITOM tool
should offer, but some of the common capabilities seen in ITOM tools include:

alert and event management capabilities

artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities, with ITOM tools morphing into a newer
technology classification, that of AIOps tools

a single pane of glass console for viewing the aggregated alerts received from multiple
monitoring tools (with this assisted by AI)

performance management insights and analytics for the corporate infrastructure

(devices including mobile devices, network, and applications)

automation and orchestration for issue resolution, which leverage AI

automated infrastructure discovery capabilities

configuration management databases (CMDBs)

application and service mapping

device management capabilities such as patch management

predictive and automated support for change, release, deployment, availability,

capacity, and problem management
 cloud management

digital experience management (DEX) capabilities.

There are additional capabilities too, but hopefully, this list indicates what ITOM can involve.

Another ITOM-software view, again from the Gartner Glossary ITOM software definition, is
that:

‘Gartner divides the ITOM market into three minisuite categories — delivery automation,
experience management and performance analysis — in addition to a roll-up of mainframe
and other nonspecified ITOM tools.

To help clients better understand the size of the market and key players in the tool
categories represented by Gartner ITOM Magic Quadrants, we have included four additional
categories of tools to align with current Magic Quadrants. These are application release
orchestration (ARO), application performance monitoring, ITSM, and network performance
monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD).’

This text places ITSM tools as a subset of ITOM tools; thus, we could conclude that ITSM is a
subset of ITOM. This is because ITSM is commonly seen as an IT operations capability.

So, there is no definitive answer as to how ITOM and ITSM are related, and the answer
depends on who you ask.

How ITOM and ITSM sit within your organization

Hopefully, this article has demonstrated that there is no definitive guidance on whether
ITSM is a subset of ITOM, ITOM a subset of ITSM, or that ITOM and ITSM are overlapping IT
management disciplines. Hence, it is a case of common sense prevailing, where ITOM and
ITSM are complementary disciplines regardless of how they are positioned.

So, the organization must decide how ITOM and ITSM work together, based on business
needs. It is no different to what organizations have already done with its ITSM capabilities in
selecting which of ITIL 4’s 34 management practices to adopt. No matter how many
practices are adopted, the organization has regardless adopted ITIL best practices and
implemented ITSM, so it benefits in both operational and outcome terms.

The same is true with ITOM capabilities, use what the organization needs, decide what to
call it, and how it sits within existing ITSM capabilities. Quite simply, do what best serves the
organization’s needs. Call it ITOM or ITSM. Or, have ITOM as an ITSM capability. Or ITSM as an
ITOM capability. It does not matter as long as what is being done delivers the best possible
outcomes for the organization.

Summary
Organizations that implement ITSM may have heard of ITOM and been unsure of what it is.
Although there is no definitative definition of ITOM, it can in some instances be used
interchangeably with ITIL. Nevertheless, an organization should implement whatever tools
is appropriate to its situation, and the decide whether to call it ITOM, ITSM, or a mixture of
the two.

Further reading
To explore the topic further, please see ITIL®4 Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support.

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