Innovative decision support for IT service management

Abstract

The IT Service Management (ITSM) industry has defined processes as best practices in the widely-accepted IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) framework. However, there are few tools available to provide decision support to IT Service Managers who wish to improve service management processes. It is essential to assess the current capability of processes before process improvements are planned. Our research addressed the problems of the lack of transparency and the need for efficiency in ITSM process assessment. Using the Design Science Research methodology, we developed an innovative Software-mediated Process Assessment (SMPA) approach that automates assessment of ITSM processes and supports the decision-making of IT Service Managers. The SMPA approach includes process selection, an online survey to collect assessment data, measurement of process capability and specific recommendations for managers to commence process improvement. We implemented a decision support system (DSS) to automate the SMPA approach and evaluated it at two IT service providers. The evaluations indicated that the SMPA approach supports decision-making on process improvements. In the future, data analytics performed on the assessment data can help IT managers to analyse and visualise the ‘big data’ of process knowledge.