The objective of service management is the coordination of specific, technical and organizational resources to provide added value to the customer through services. Service management according to ITIL is a framework and as such contains all the necessary and specialized organizational capabilities available for the generation of added value to the customer as services. Included are service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement.

Separation into production, distribution and using IT applications is outdated. Total cost of ownership analyses show a significant re-distribution of costs from the development to the operation of the IT.

IT service management is the management framework which plans, monitors and controls the quality of the delivered services. The correcting variables are derived from the business targets and customer orientation as well as cost optimization.

The three main goals of service management are:

1. Adaption of IT services towards the present and the future requirements of the enterprise and its customers.
2. Optimization of the quality of delivered services
3. Reduction of long term cost of service delivery

These process definitions and the associated main goals lead to a fundamental change of philosophy: IT users are now IT service customers!