Enabling a culture for IT services; the role of the IT infrastructure library

Abstract

Building on process management and service climate theories, this paper investigates the pertinent issues of whether firms that implement ITIL best practices for IT service management will also experience growth in their process management activities and IT service climate. First, ITIL practices imply that processes in the IT department should be managed on a daily basis; without process management, ITIL will fail beyond its initial implementation. Second, two of the main reasons for adopting ITIL are to become a service-oriented organisation and to deliver IT services that meet business needs. Thus, we hypothesise that as the implementation status of ITIL increases, process management and IT service climate will be enhanced. Using data from 161 Nordic IT functions, we found empirical support for the hypotheses, indicating that ITIL is a management tool for influencing behaviour in service production that strengthens the IT service climate directly and indirectly through process management. As such, ITIL represents both an alternative and a complement to service management initiatives focusing on IT service climate. We discuss implications and suggest avenues for further research.