Let’s try to imagine a well-organized city. On one side, there’s the administration: managing services, listening to citizens, making strategic decisions to improve quality of life in the short, medium, and long term. On the other side, there are the essential infrastructures – electrical networks, telephone systems, water facilities, transportation and much more – that operate in the background to ensure everything runs without interruption.
In the IT world, this dichotomy is reflected in two fundamental approaches: ITSM (IT Service Management) and ITOM (IT Operations Management). The first manages the relationship with the user and service delivery; the second guarantees the stability and continuity of IT operations.
In 2025, many companies find themselves at a crossroads, which we can brutally summarize as follows: prioritize operational efficiency or the perceived quality of service?
Let’s say it right away: today it’s not about choosing. We’ll get there. But let’s proceed step by step, first identifying the areas of competence of ITSM and ITOM and their differences.
ITSM: The Heart of Service, User Experience-Oriented
IT Service Management (ITSM) is the framework that governs the design, delivery, management, and improvement of IT services.
It’s based on best practices like those defined by ITIL (regarding this, see our previous article) and has as its main objective the alignment of IT services with business needs, ensuring support quality and, consequently, end-user satisfaction.
The main ITSM processes include:
- Incident management: the process that enables rapid identification, recording, and resolution of incidents that interrupt or degrade IT services, minimizing business impact.
- Problem management: aims to identify and remove the root causes of incidents, preventing their recurrence and improving overall IT infrastructure stability.
- Change management: manages changes to IT infrastructure in a controlled manner, reducing risks related to service interruptions and ensuring that every modification is documented and approved.
- Service request management: handles the efficient processing of users’ standard requests, such as access to an application or password reset, often through self-service portals.
- Configuration management: ensures that all IT assets and their relationships are identified, tracked, and updated in a centralized database (CMDB), essential for supporting other ITSM processes.
Products like EasyVista Service Manager help implement these processes with a high degree of automation, offering intuitive dashboards, ticket automation, and native integration with other IT tools.
Let’s say it very clearly: ITSM is fundamental, but alone it’s no longer enough.
ITOM: Operational Efficiency and Real-Time Control
If ITSM focuses on the user front and perceived service quality, ITOM (IT Operations Management) comes into play to ensure that the IT infrastructure on which everything rests is always performant, elastic, and ready to react.
In other words, it represents the technical and invisible heart that keeps the entire IT ecosystem alive.
Here are the main activities that concern ITOM:
- System and network monitoring: includes constant control of IT infrastructure – servers, networks, databases, applications – to detect anomalies, failures, and performance degradation in real time.
- Automation of operational tasks: involves automating repetitive or low-value-added activities (such as restarting services or cleaning logs), reducing manual workload and improving reactivity.
- Performance and availability management: ensures that IT resources are always operational and performant, with clear uptime objectives and defined service levels (SLA).
- Event management and automatic remediation: involves detecting, correlating, and analyzing system events to activate, when possible, automatic corrective actions that prevent escalation to more serious problems.
ITOM, therefore, is what enables IT to move from a reactive to a proactive and predictive approach. In this context, products like EV Observe can position themselves as solutions for proper continuous infrastructure monitoring, anomaly identification, and activation of corrective workflows, with extensive automation possibilities. e, identificazione delle anomalie e l’attivazione di workflow correttivi, con ampie possibilità di automazione.
ITOM vs ITSM: A False Dichotomy?
The comparison between ITOM and ITSM is sometimes reduced to an either-or choice. In reality – we anticipated this from the beginning of the article – the choice shouldn’t be between one or the other, but on which aspect to prioritize based on your business needs.
Here are some considerations for orientation:
Focus:
ITSM: focuses on user experience and perceived service quality.
ITOM: aims at operational performance, system stability, and service continuity.
Main objective:
ITSM: manage and support IT services in line with user expectations and SLAs.
ITOM: maintain infrastructure efficient, performant, and ready to intervene proactively.
Key activities:
ITSM: ticketing, incident management, service level measurement.
ITOM: proactive monitoring, operations automation, automatic event resolution.
Expected benefits:
ITSM: greater user satisfaction, more structured governance, process visibility.
ITOM: operational efficiency, reduced downtime, problem prevention.
Technologies employed:
ITSM: self-service portals, AI for request triage, guided workflows.
ITOM: AIOps solutions, automated orchestration, predictive monitoring tools.
In 2025, the keyword is integration. No more ITSM vs. ITOM. The real breakthrough is given by the ability to make these two systems communicate. In this sense, the role of automation, today more than ever, is to act as a bridge.
Automation: The Bridge Between ITOM and ITSM
In the journey toward more integrated and continuously improving IT management, automation represents the natural link between ITSM and ITOM.
Attention! It’s not “just” about making processes faster, more efficient, and secure; but also about building true distributed operational intelligence, capable of intervening proactively both on the service front and on the infrastructure side.
Thanks to automation, in fact:
- ITSM flows, such as opening, assigning, and managing tickets, become faster, reducing intervention times, improving experience quality and user satisfaction;
- ITOM activities, such as event detection, correlation, and incident response, transform into intelligent mechanisms, capable of acting autonomously based on predefined rules and patterns;
- Operations between the two worlds, consequently, integrate: an anomaly detected at the operational level can automatically generate a request or incident at the service level, feeding a virtuous circle of control and continuous improvement.
Automation, therefore, is not just scalability support: it’s the strategic enabler of unified, elastic, predictive IT management.
When ITOM and ITSM Work Together – Three Common Use Cases
The integration between ITOM and ITSM produces enormous advantages in daily IT service management. We’ve seen this in all the previous sections of this article.
Now let’s close by isolating three practical examples where this synergy transforms operational efficiency and support quality. Three examples that already concern many companies today, across various sectors, sizes, and characteristics.
1. Enhanced Incident Management
Thanks to the integration between ITOM and ITSM, an anomaly detected through monitoring systems (like EV Observe) can automatically generate a ticket on specific platforms (like EV Service Manager). This ticket, consequently, is categorized via AI and assigned to the competent team. All without human intervention.
2. Automated Request Management
A recurring request from users (for example, password reset) can be managed directly through a self-service portal and completed by an automatic workflow, without going through first-level support.
3. Secure Change Management
Before applying a critical change, ITOM tools can validate the infrastructure state, simulate impacts, and update the CMDB and ITSM systems in real time. This way, security is reinforced on all fronts.
Conclusion: A Synergy for Digital Maturity
We emphasized this from the beginning. In 2025, the priority is no longer choosing between ITOM vs ITSM, but developing a strategic synergy between the two areas.
The most mature organizations, in fact, are those that manage to unify service management and operations, automating flows, improving reactivity, and minimizing operational risk.
Automation and advanced monitoring are no longer a plus, but a structural necessity for those who want to guarantee high performance, user satisfaction, and digital resilience.
Integrated platforms like EasyVista’s represent an ideal tool to achieve these objectives concretely and scalably, gradually and tailored to your business.
FAQ
What is the main difference between ITOM and ITSM?
ITSM focuses on managing and delivering IT services to users, while ITOM focuses on the operational functioning of IT infrastructure.
Are ITOM and ITSM alternatives or complementary? T
hey are complementary. Modern and complete IT management integrates them to guarantee both system reliability and service quality.
How can automation improve ITSM and ITOM?
By automating repetitive processes, improving incident response speed, optimizing request management, and reducing workload for teams.