IT service management (ITSM) software is the system in which a company's IT department logs each employee's request as a ticket, sends it to the right team and tracks it until it is done. It is also called service desk software or IT ticketing software.
Tickets are of two main kinds. An incident is something that has broken, such as a laptop that will not start. A service request is something an employee wants, such as a new monitor or access to an application. Each ticket gets a priority. Each priority has a target time, which is written in a service level agreement, or SLA. For example, the SLA may say that a high-priority incident must be fixed within four hours. If a ticket comes close to its target time, the software alerts a senior person. This is called escalation.
Take, for example, a new accountant who joins a tyre maker in Chennai on a Monday. A week earlier, HR enters her joining date in the HR system. This creates one request in the ITSM software: "new joiner, accounts team". The software splits the request into tasks, in a fixed order. This order is called a workflow. The hardware team gets a task to prepare her laptop. The identity team gets a task to create her email account and her accounting software login, through identity governance (IGA). Access to the payment system needs her manager's approval, so the software sends him an approval request. Each task has its own deadline. On Monday at 9:30 a.m., her laptop is on her desk and her accounts work. The request closes when every task is done.
The software also keeps a list of every laptop, server and application, and of which ones depend on which. This list is called the configuration management database, or CMDB. So a technician who opens a ticket can see the employee's laptop model and its installed software, which unified endpoint management (UEM) reports. In this way, the ITSM software is the system of record for IT requests and IT assets.
Not every ticket comes from a person. Infrastructure monitoring opens an incident when a server fails. SOAR, a security tool, opens a ticket for a security incident. Changes are tracked too. Before an engineer changes a server, the engineer files a change request, and a group of senior staff approves it. This reduces outages caused by careless changes.
The same workflow engine now also runs HR requests, office requests and security incidents. This wider use is called enterprise service management. The most common requests are now often answered by an AI service desk agent first. How is ITSM different from help desk software? A help desk handles tickets from a company's customers. ITSM handles tickets from its own employees, and it also tracks the machines and changes behind them. Software teams plan their own work in a different tool, an issue tracker.