ITSM Glossary of Terms

What is Email Drip? 

An email drip is a sequence of automated emails sent to prospects or customers based on certain criteria, such as an action they take or a particular date. You can control the cadence and number of emails in a given drip and add personalization tokens to target an individual or audience. 

The phrase “drip marketing,” which is most commonly done through email, plays off “drip irrigation,” an agricultural method that gives plants a certain amount of water across a long period of time. 

The key to success for most email drips is precise audience segmentation and persona knowledge. Stefano Mazzalai, the Head of Marketing Operations at Instapage, said that “...it is possible to create highly segmented drip campaigns with 70%+ open rates and 30%+ click rates. It is all about how much you know the pain points of each target audience and what you can offer to solve their issues.” 

What are ITSM Ticket Digests?

A ticket digest summarizes the activity for a certain ticket or group of tickets. IT automation can be used to create ticket digests, which present information you might need, such as how many tickets are unresolved, what’s the status of certain tickets, and more. 

You can also create digest-based processes and workflows so that certain actions are automatically taken based on the contents of the compiled digest. When people eat, they digest, meaning they break food down into smaller parts that their bodies can process. So too, a ticket digest is a palatable summary and breakdown of a given ticket’s activity.

What is Procedure Management? 

Procedures are put in place so that certain actions are taken in a seamless sequence that cuts out irrelevant and repetitive steps. Procedure management is a systemic approach to ensuring that the right procedures are put in place, stay updated, and remain efficient. 

When done right, procedure management involves implementing 4 major components: 

• Document: track and write down all of the steps of a given procedure 
• Maintain: continually access and update procedures 
• Communicate: convey important procedural information and updates to all users  
• Manage: business managers should monitor procedures to make sure they’re aligned with goals and operating at maximum efficiency 

What is Help Desk? 

When IT clients have a problem, they contact the help desk for assistance. The help desk can be an individual, a team, or an entire organization that takes calls or messages. The help desk responds to customers with the information, resources, and solutions needed to resolve any issues with hardware or software. A help desk will: 

• Create and manage tickets 
• Handle client responses and communication 
• Escalate urgent issues 
• Update and manage a resource center/knowledge base 

The first iteration of help desks was call centers, which emerged in the 1960s. Two to three decades later, the help desk, a term coined by IBM, was officially born.  

What is Tech Ecosystem? 

A tech ecosystem is a connection of systems that IT teams and businesses use to provide products and services that are cohesive and interdependent. A tech ecosystem might comprise an actual tech stack, or refer to interconnected organizations. 

The term “ecosystem” was first coined in 1930 by Roy Clapham and was further defined by Arthur Tansley in 1935. Eventually, as business technology emerged, so did the term tech ecosystem, referring to the core, complementary applications or organizations involved in technology. 

A tech ecosystem in a city, for example, might comprise: 

• strong developer community 
• accelerators and tech hubs 
• tech-focused startups 
• established businesses and companies 
• engagement and connection 
• Universities/Schools 

These 6 entities come together to support growth in tech.  

What is Ticket Triage? 

Ticket triaging is the process of sorting, prioritizing, and assigning tickets to the appropriate department or tech for follow-up. The term triage dates back to 18th century France. In the 1930s, triage adopted its modern definition, which is the assigning of urgency levels to injuries in the medical field. Similarly, ticket triaging assigns varying levels of urgency to tickets to ensure that the high-priority tickets are dealt with first.  

Manual ticket triage can be tedious, especially for large companies, so many businesses have started using IT automation to automate the ticket triage process and assign urgency based on detectable criteria. 

What is Integration? 

Integration, specifically in the IT realm, is the process of bringing together two or more IT systems to work together as a single system. It can be done at different levels, from integrating one system with another to integrating multiple systems across multiple departments, and it's essential for many companies' success. 

As IT systems developed over time, it became common to have multiple solutions from multiple vendors that did not communicate with each other. Integration became a necessity when siloed tech stacks started negatively impacting business.  

What is Service Orchestration? 

Service orchestration is a process that allows you to automate the flow of tasks and processes across multiple services, which can include applications, servers, networks and other IT resources. Many times, when someone uses the term “IT automation,” they’re actually referring to orchestration, which automates an IT-driven process, rather than a single task. 

According to Gartner’s 2021 SOAP Market Guide, ““Infrastructure and operations leaders must use platforms for service orchestration and automation to deliver customer-focused agility as part of their cloud, big data and DevOps initiatives.” 

What are Service Recipes? 

A service recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to perform a service. 

Service recipes can be used to automate the execution of maintenance tasks, allowing for greater reliability and cost-effectiveness. For example, a service recipe might provide a step-by-step guide for how to install a new version of a software package on a server. 

In modern IT environments, service recipes are often used to handle repetitive tasks or provide clear instructions to users in order to free up system administrators' time so that they can focus on other important aspects of managing an organization's infrastructure. 

What are APIs? 

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of rules and specifications that allow two applications to communicate with each other. An API allows one application to make use of the features provided by another application, often without having to reinvent the wheel. 

Though the concept of APIs seems to pre-date the term itself, the term was first used in a clear way in the paper Data Structures and Techniques for Remote Computer Graphics in 1968.