Process in ITSM maturity: designed on purpose, owned, measured and improved
Processes are where service management either works or fails quietly. This domain checks whether the way work flows is designed deliberately, owned by someone accountable, and measured against outcomes rather than activity.
A process that is not designed, owned and measured is just a habit
In ITIL 4 terms this is the value streams and processes dimension: how the parts of an organization work together to create value. ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 sets the formal expectation, requiring an organization to establish, implement, maintain and continually improve a service management system.
Most organizations are candid that they have further to go. In the AXELOS ITSM Benchmarking Report 2022, 48% of respondents rated the success of their ITSM as great or good, 27% said they were getting there, and 22% said there was still much to improve. The survey ran in the fourth quarter of 2021, so read it as a directional picture rather than a current measurement.
The pattern behind numbers like these is familiar from assessment work. Teams adopt a framework’s vocabulary, document the process to satisfy an audit, then bypass it under pressure. Maturity is not the documents. It is whether the documented process is the one people really follow, and whether anyone can show the evidence.
How organizations rate the success of their ITSM
Seven things we look at in the process domain
Each area is answered against the five levels, so the result separates processes that are genuinely working from processes that only look good on paper.
- Ownership and documentationNamed owners, current procedures, and a check that the documentation matches practice.
- Alignment to a referenceHow closely practices follow ITIL 4 or the clauses of ISO/IEC 20000-1, and where you have deliberately chosen to differ.
- KPIs, SLAs and reportingWhether measures describe outcomes for the business, and whether anyone acts on them.
- Integration between processesHandoffs and shared data between incident, problem, change, request, knowledge and configuration management.
- Continual improvementA live improvement register, with evidence of improvements raised, funded and closed.
- Compliance and audit evidenceRecords showing that controls operated, available without a scramble before an audit.
- Supplier and partner interfacesHow external teams and providers plug into your processes and report against them.
Three points on the scale for process
Every domain is scored on the same five levels. These are the anchor points we use most often when we talk with clients about where they are and where they should aim.
Informal and person-dependent. Records are inconsistent, and the same incident can be handled three different ways.
Processes are documented, owned and measured. Key processes share data, reporting is regular, and procedures are reviewed on a schedule.
Measures are tied to business outcomes. Flows are automated where sensible, and improvement is routine and linked to the value streams.
Three patterns we see again and again
Documented for the audit, bypassed in practice
Change and incident records are back-filled after the work is done. The process exists on paper and the real one runs beside it.
Processes designed in isolation
Incident, problem, change and configuration each have their own owner and their own data. Handoffs fail at the seams, which is where many outages begin.
Measuring activity instead of outcome
Tickets closed and SLAs met look healthy while repeat incidents, failed changes and user frustration go unreported.
These are practitioner observations from assessment and implementation work, not survey findings. They are why process is scored on its own rather than inferred from the tool.
One domain of six, scored on the same 0 to 5 scale
Process is scored from questions on ownership, documentation, measurement, integration and improvement. In a deep-dive we also score each process area on its own, so you can see which processes are carrying the rest. See how the numbers are produced on our scoring methodology page, or read the other domain guides.
See how your processes really score.
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Start free trial assessmentSources. AXELOS, ITSM Benchmarking Report 2022 (survey fieldwork Q4 2021). ISO, ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018. Survey figures are reported as published by each source.