Improving IT Service Management with Decision-Making Support Systems

Abstract

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a managerial approach to deliver value through IT services. This service-oriented world-view has required new knowledge on processes and tools to cope with the planning, design, building, operation, and improvement of IT services. While some decisions can be efficiently and effectively made by a manager alone, more complex decisions require further analysis and can benefit from the use of computerized Decision-Making Support Systems (DMSS). Although DMSS have been available for several decades, they have not been used to support ITSM processes and decisions. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that ITSM would benefit from the utilization of DMSS. To this end, we provide a description of the decision-making process and decisional services embedded in the DMSS architecture and analyze how ITSM processes and decisions can be supported by DMSS. This chapter aims to foster more specific research on DMSS for ITSM.