Information Technology Support Services Research Articles

IT support services conceptual engagement model

The Information Technology (IT) Support Engagement Conceptual Model was considered in light of IT service management (ITSM) frameworks, including the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the Service Support and Service Delivery (SSSD) models in addition to the Ansoff strategic planning model. The IT service growth strategies model proposes a standardized approach to frame the enterprise Business to Business (B2B) IT services growth strategies from operational efficiency, diversification, evaluation, and incubation. The model identifies the IT support service strategies and priorities by examining the product maturity and support service status in the organization. The IT Support Conceptual Engagement Model provides a standardized decision-making strategic framework to view the support service ‘onboarding’ decision-making criteria. This model proposes three service influencing constructs that are; impact, volume, and complexity, aligned with corporate strategy to govern the service delivery decision-making process. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce the IT Support Engagement Conceptual Model as a novel framework to explain how enterprises can capture, identify, and strategize opportunities to expand an organization’s IT services in line with the corporate objectives. The model recommends different approaches and strategies to deal with different impact, volume, and complexity influencing factors while catering to any organization’s nuanced factors.

Airport Common-Use Check-in Operations: A Novel and Efficient Model

This paper examines the capacity problems of common-use environment service improvement and airport passenger services in line with information technology (IT) issues. There are many time-critical processes in the airport terminal for the necessary airport passenger flow processes that IT service design aims to support it. Many flow processes can be designed under several functions while international, domestic, or general aviation cases. The current approaches have been based on the standard industrial methods based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) practices. However, this infrastructure library practices’ distinct general industrial foundations and airport time-critical processes could not fit customer expectations. This research offers an approach by adding a pre-layer with a user certification rather than fixing the problems on the ground. Although the proposed novel model does not conflict with the ITIL practices, it primarily develops the practices by coinciding with them a certificated training of end users to establish a positive passenger experience and helping the profitability of the airport. The offered model simulation results show that the Airport IT Service helpdesk and field team instantaneous utilization average was reduced from 96% to 28%, and the field team queue duration during the airport peak hours was 26 minutes to 2 minutes. This study demonstrates that the airport IT support service design should be reconsidered during its passenger service operation.

Impact of Effective Information Technology Governance on Audit Technology Performance in Ghana

The notion of Industry 4.0 significantly changed the way firms’ operate and has influenced everyday life. The rapid digitalization and emergent trend of information technology (IT) transformation in firms and ample investment in IT by Ghanaian government stimulated the importance of IT-based risks and its associated controls. In addition, technology enabled the auditing and IT-related audit methods have significance when carrying out audit tasks. This study aims to investigate the effects of IT governess effectiveness on audit technology performance in the public sector of Ghana. This study used closed-ended to collect data. An online survey admitted to record 186 responses. The findings of the study stated that top management support, IT support services, and IT committee have a positive and statistically significant influence on audit technology performance. The proposed model of the study explained 65.1% variance in the audit technology performance. The study proposes that public sector companies must strengthen IT governance by developing an appropriate IT committee and IT support services for the auditors. Besides, firms should clearly elucidate their priorities and requirements associated with technology-based training in their IT policies, and action plans to improve the utilization of audit technology. Keywords: Information technology governance, audit technology performance, IT support services, IT committee, top management support. DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/11-24-05 Publication date: December 31 st 2020

Using the IDEAL model for the construction of a deployment framework of IT Service Desks at the Brazilian Federal Institutes of Education

Brazilian Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology (FIs) have expanded through multicampi structure, which has led to profound changes in their administrative and academic organization. As consequence of this expansion, the demand for services, systems, and information technology (IT) solutions has increased; and the support service’s provision has become much more relevant. However, a diagnosis of the quality of the IT support services, performed with the FI’s CIOs, has shown that the service’s provision in these institutions is below required. There are several problems encountered, such as political and cultural issues, lack of stakeholder involvement, insufficient staff, resistance to change, lack of priorities, excessive demands, lack of knowledge of best practices, and the use of inappropriate tools. So, there is a clear need to develop a proposal to help the FIs to improve their IT support services. The Service Desk is an alternative, since it implements a unique interface between users and the IT sector, however, with a broader role than just the technical support, as it embraces processes, people, and technologies geared to IT management. This work aimed to develop a framework, with a practical approach on “how to do,” which guides the implementation and/or the improvement of Service Desks of the Federal Institutes. The proposal sought incorporates several practices related to Service Desk, identified in ITIL, ISO 20000, CMMI-SVC, and MR-MPS-SV models, creating a deployment and/or improvement approach through a life cycle framework, based on the IDEAL model, and a process toolbox, structured according to the seven dimensions of the EPMF. The research is relevant due to the lack of guidelines for the implementation and/or improvement of Service Desks from a practical point of view, since the main models found focus on “what has to be done,” and little on “how to do.” The IT support service’s current situation diagnosis in the IFs showed that the service provisioning was less than expected. The need to develop a proposal to help the FIs to improve the IT support service became evident, and the QoS-IT framework emerged. After the framework’s development, it was evaluated by IFs specialists and, posteriorly, it was used and evaluated in the context of a specific Federal Institute. Finally, a gap analysis was done between user satisfaction surveys, comparing the results obtained before and after the Service Desk deployment at the Federal Institute, which presented evidences of a positive impact on the service provision after using the framework.

Towards successful digital transformation through co-creation: a longitudinal study of a four-year implementation of digital monitoring technology in residential care for persons with dementia

BackgroundImplementation of digital monitoring technology systems is considered beneficial for increasing the safety and quality of care for residents in nursing homes and simultaneously improving care providers’ workflow. Co-creation is a suitable approach for developing and implementing digital technologies and transforming the service accordingly. This study aimed to identify the facilitators and barriers for implementation of digital monitoring technology in residential care for persons with dementia and wandering behaviour, and explore co-creation as an implementation strategy and practice.MethodsIn this longitudinal case study, we observed and elicited the experiences of care providers and healthcare managers in eight nursing homes, in addition to those of the information technology (IT) support services and technology vendors, during a four-year implementation process. We were guided by theories on innovation, implementation and learning, as well as co-creation and design. The data were analysed deductively using a determinants of innovation framework, followed by an inductive content analysis of interview and observation data.ResultsThe implementation represented radical innovation and required far more resources than the incremental changes anticipated by the participants. Five categories of facilitators and barriers were identified, including several subcategories for each category: 1) Pre-implementation preparations; 2) Implementation strategy; 3) Technology stability and usability; 4) Building competence and organisational learning; and 5) Service transformation and quality management. The combination of IT infrastructure instability and the reluctance of the IT support service to contribute in co-creating value with the healthcare services was the most persistent barrier. Overall, the co-creation methodology was the most prominent facilitator, resulting in a safer night monitoring service.ConclusionSuccessful implementation of novel digital monitoring technologies in the care service is a complex and time-consuming process and even more so when the technology allows care providers to radically transform clinical practices at the point of care, which offers new affordances in the co-creation of value with their residents. From a long-term perspective, the digital transformation of municipal healthcare services requires more advanced IT competence to be integrated directly into the management and provision of healthcare and value co-creation with service users and their relatives.

Application of Lean Six Sigma in IT support services – a case study

Purpose Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been accepted globally across the service sector as a management strategy for achieving process excellence. In the past one decade, the application and success of LSS in services is remarkable across Information Technology (IT) organisations. However academic research has seldom derived implications from this practitioner’s science of improving processes. The purpose of this paper is to feature the application of LSS in the system maintenance department of a manufacturing firm. Design/methodology/approach The research reported in this paper is based on a case study carried out in system maintenance department using the Six Sigma Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control (DMAIC) approach and its application in reducing complaint resolution time. Findings The LSS article presented here highlights a real-world case study of how LSS DMAIC methodology help reduce the complaint resolution time from 12.5 to 8.5 h (~30 per cent improvement) and the corresponding standard deviation from 28 to 17.4 days. This study also has resulted in reducing the turn-around-time of all the core processes in the organisation. The indirect financial savings estimated as a result of this overall impact was around INR2.5m. Research limitations/implications The research was restricted to studying the impact of LSS in one organisation. The validity of the results can be improved by including more organisations and more case studies from the IT support services. Originality/value This could serve as a resource for both practitioners to derive useful implications and to academicians as it contributes to the LSS body of knowledge towards theory testing.

Development of a student-driven information technology support service

Background and purposeTo share our experience of a partnership created amongst students, staff, and faculty in order to address a gap in campus information technology (IT) customer services provided to students. Educational activity and settingStudent reliance on a complex educational technology ecosystem requires a robust IT infrastructure; however, campus IT services are often stretched in terms of their capacity to deliver immediate customer support. Compounding this problem is the inability of campus IT services to address issues arising from pharmacy education specific hardware or software. A student help desk (SHD), a student-initiated technology user group was developed. The support provided by the SHD covers student devices to the level of ensuring access to required curriculum technological resources. FindingsOver 24 months, a total of 259 cases were addressed by the SHD. When examining the type of submissions, the top five requested categories included computer-based assessment, e-mail synchronization, curricular management software synchronization, wireless printing and encryption. These results suggest the perceived value and confidence by students and faculty in the service provided by the SHD. SummaryThe use of a SHD helped to resolve technology issues faced by students for curriculum engagement. Regardless of the challenges institutions may face in delivering their curriculum, students have the desire to be engaged in the governance of their curriculum. By creating a collaborative triad, this represents one example of how student motivation can be leveraged to conquer not just gaps in IT customer service, but potentially other programmatic issues within an institution.

Analysis of Voice of Customer data through data and text mining

The importance of great customer service to building a strong business has prompted increased interest in applying text analytics to customer data. To demonstrate power data and text-mining techniques, we present two case studies outlining the use of advanced text analytics for the analysis of Voice of Customer (VoC) data collected from both external and internal customers of Taco Bell Corporation. External VoC data was collected through several channels over three years and analysed using text-mining techniques. Using historical data, a detailed taxonomy of keywords that typically occur in customer comments was developed to characterise these comments into meaningful categories, with sentiment scoring rules applied to the keywords for further classification. Over 2,000,000 customer contacts were analysed, and the findings were correlated to the structured data collected on the surveys, providing key insights on product, service and facility topics. The impact on overall satisfaction was measured for each topic area, providing focus for the operation of the restaurant. A second case study highlights how data and text-mining techniques provided actionable insights, allowing the internal information technology support service desk to implement changes that improve call answering times and reduce the impact of these issues on sales transaction revenue.

Ontology-based Document Mining System for IT Support Service

Information Technology (IT) is a vital and an integral part of every organization. IT executives are constantly faced with problems that are difficult to tackle and time consuming. Experience is required to solve these problems easier and faster. We can utilize case-based reasoning (CBR), data mining and information retrieval (IR) techniques to automate IT problem solving and experience management. In this paper, we propose an IT ontology-based system for semantic retrieval that increases the efficiency and quality of IT support service. The proposed approach retrieves similar problem/solution pairs based on the concepts in the query and performs better than the traditional keyword-based approach especially in cases where the keywords of the relevant documents do not match the keywords in the query.

SEMANTIC APPROACH UTILIZING DATA MINING AND CASE-BASED REASONING FOR IT SUPPORT SERVICE

Information Technology (IT) plays a very important role in all organizations. IT executives are constantly faced with problems that are difficult to tackle. Failure in IT service can interrupt the functioning of an organization. Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a problem solving methodology where experience in the form of past cases can be used to solve problems, thereby assisting the automation of problem solving and experience management. Furthermore, the performance, quality and efficiency of CBR systems can be enhanced through data mining. In order to support the IT team for faster and efficient problem resolution, a case-based reasoning approach integrated with data mining techniques could be utilized. In this paper, the study done on various CBR systems and data mining techniques for problem and experience management is explained. A system is proposed for IT experience and problem management with semantic retrieval in order to increase the efficiency and quality of the IT support service.

Understanding Post-Implementation Support for Enterprise Systems: An Empirical Study of IT Personnel's Customer-Oriented Citizenship Behaviors

ABSTRACTPost-implementation support for information systems (ISs) remains an important but under-explored topic. In this study, we focus on the customer service aspect of post-implementation support for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and examine the antecedents and performance consequences of customer-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) performed by information technology (IT) personnel. We predict that characteristics of IT support tasks influence IT personnel's customer-oriented OCBs, which in turn exert both direct and moderating effects on their task efficiency. The analysis of 300 support tickets in relation to two ERP modules (Supplier Relationship Management and HR/Payroll Management) in a large enterprise provides mixed results. Task type was found to be associated significantly with the occurrence of OCBs, but the influence of task complexity was not significant. Moreover, OCBs were found to be negatively related to task efficiency, but the degree of the negative relation was contingent on task type and task complexity. The findings enhance our understanding of IT support services and extend the OCB literature on customer orientation. Practically, the results offer insights into managing IT support and IT workforce during the post-implementation stage of information systems.

From group work to teamwork: A case study of “Lean” rapid process improvement in the ThedaCare Information Technology Department

This paper presents a mixed-methods case study of process improvement at the information technology (IT) Department of ThedaCare, a Northeast Wisconsin community health system. As part of its broader goal to improve care, ThedaCare launched a “Lean” improvement project directed at IT support or “fix work” services. IT Department staff, IT support service customers, and a Lean facilitator participated in a weeklong rapid improvement event. Participants identified opportunities for process improvement, collected baseline measures on how (and how well) the IT Department was providing support services, and jointly developed a preliminary solution centered on a new team-based organization of support services. Rather than forwarding service requests to groups of support staff organized by IT application type, service requests would now be resolved on-the-spot by a team with distributed knowledge of multiple applications. Six and twelve months post-intervention, there was some evidence of success, including performance improvement and staff buy-in. We use realistic evaluation as an organizing framework to describe potential links between the intervention content and process, the surrounding context, and the outcomes of the intervention. We hypothesize four mechanisms that mediate this link: work standardization; connections between people; seamless flow; and participatory problem solving. We conclude that other organizations can learn as much from ThedaCare's participatory rapid improvement process and Lean approach to transformational change as from the actual implemented changes. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering to view the free supplemental file.

Clinicians, security and information technology support services in practice settings--a pilot study.

This case study of 9 information technology (IT) support staff in 3 Australian (Victoria) public hospitals juxtaposes their experiences at the user-level of eHealth security in the Natural Hospital Environment with that previously reported by 26 medical, nursing and allied healthcare clinicians. IT support responsibilities comprised the entire hospital, of which clinician eHealth security needs were only part. IT staff believed their support tasks were often fragmented while work responsibilities were hampered by resources shortages. They perceived clinicians as an ongoing security risk to private health information. By comparison clinicians believed IT staff would not adequately support the private and secure application of eHealth for patient care. Preliminary data analysis suggests the tension between these cohorts manifests as an eHealth environment where silos of clinical work are disconnected from silos of IT support work. The discipline-based silos hamper health privacy outcomes. Privacy and security policies, especially those influencing the audit process, will benefit by further research of this phenomenon.

Successful Web-Based IT Support Services

Web-based self-service systems (WSSs) are increasingly leveraged for the delivery of after-sales information technology (IT) support services. Such services are offered by IT service providers to customer firms and increasingly involve business partners. However little is known of the challenges faced by IT service providers as a result of the involvement of the other firms and their employees (end-users). This paper reports related findings from an interpretive study of IT service provider perceptions in six multinational IT service provider firms (Cooper, 2007). The findings highlight that, for IT service providers, (1) it is important to consider and resolve the needs and concerns of other key stakeholders, and (2) significant challenges exist in doing so. The main contribution of the paper is the identification of the key challenges involved. Important implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Structure of organisational information technology service

Information Technology support services are in crisis, due to dramatically increased expectations and stable or dwindling funding. IT operating problems are detrimental to end user productivity and satisfaction. Support has become a key driver in obtaining value from Information Technology. The difference between what users expect and what they actually receive is the support gap. The results of an empirical investigation show that the support gap negatively affects key organisational success factors. Further, it is demonstrated that the total support gap is divisible into two major components. The first is referred to as the expectation gap which is distinct from the second, the realisation gap. Each component has different causes. In order to reduce the support gap, different management actions are required for each of the two components. The results suggest that minimising IT support gaps requires a range of different actions including modifying expectations, changing the approach to training, and developing partnerships.

Information technology support services: crisis or opportunity?

Reports that information technology support services are in crisis, owing to dramatically increased expectations and stable or dwindling funding. Examines the root causes and suggests actions which may help resolve the situation by reducing expectations, increasing effectiveness and building partnerships.

Information technology support services

Information technology support services are in crisis, due to dramatically increased expectations and stable or dwindling funding. We examine the root causes and suggest actions which may help resolve the situation by reducing expectations, increasing effectiveness, and building partnerships.