A service management office (SMO) is a center of excellence within your organization chartered to improve the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of delivering services to your users and business functions. The SMO accomplishes this charter by leveraging industry standards and best practices – applying them to your organization’s unique environment.
two men turning a page on a bookService management has been a familiar concept for many years and has become a common framework for IT organizations to contemplate, plan and manage the activities they perform in support of the broader business organization.
The challenge many IT organizations face when implementing service management is balancing the desire for centralized control and process consistency with the efficiency and scale that is the result of distributing (federating) service management activities to different parts of the organization. The service management office provides a solution to that challenge by creating a function with the explicit purpose of coordinating service-management activities throughout the IT organization.
When many different people are involved in delivering services, it is important to have clear accountability for all of the services your organization provides (both business and IT services). This includes owning the vision for and the execution of the design, delivery, orchestration and support of the services. This “all-up” accountability ensures users receive consistent service experiences, regardless of which IT teams are involved in service delivery.
