IT Service Provider Organizations Research Articles

The IT Services Management Architecture Design for Large and Medium-sized Companies based on ITIL 4 and TOGAF Framework

The development of information technology occurs rapidly in almost all areas of life. All companies must immediately carry out a business transformation following the development of information technology to survive amid increasingly fierce competition. One of the keys to this business transformation's success is an enterprise architecture that is used as a reference in planning, developing, operating, and monitoring company information technology. Implementation of service management practices in state-owned enterprises needs to be translated into IT Services Management Architecture Design, that match the IT Governance Principles as mandated in PER-03/MBU/02/2018. This research focuses on preparing an enterprise architecture design in IT service management by referring to ITIL 4 best practices. The resulting solution is a target architecture design in the business domain, data, and applications arranged according to the TOGAF framework. It was carried out in four stages: scope identification, which defines practices; preliminary phase, which resulted in 11 architecture principles; architecture vision that produces a value chain for IT service provider organizations; a business architecture which resulted in a business service/function catalog consisting of 13 business functions and 43 business services; and an information system architecture that produces a conceptual data model on the three main priority processes of IT service management and an application use-case diagram that describes the relationship between the four actors (users, service managers, service desks, and support groups) with their roles in applications. The enterprise architecture has been designed following the scope of IT service management practices commonly used as a reference for all large and medium-sized companies.

Anatomy of an innovation in IT service

The case study covers aspects of service innovation in the IT services sector. The client Nordics is a global telecommunication major. They have a large and diverse set of IT business applications, most of which is on SAP applications. The subject of the case study is that of SAP Releases, the service of enhancing and creating new business functionalities in the existing business applications. The case is seen from the perspective of the Program Manager of the SAP Release service. This service is delivered by the IT Services major AVON. The case study covers the full lifecycle of the innovation in service, from the identification of the need, conceptualization and creation of the service offering up till pilot execution. The important aspects of innovation in the revenue model and service delivery model are also covered. The case can be analyzed from two perspectives, as a detailed lifecycle of a major innovation in service or as a requirement of dynamic capabilities in the IT service provider organization, to bring about that innovation.

Defining the relationships between IT service management and IT service governance

IT service provider organizations need both IT service management (ITSM) and IT service governance (ITSG) to ensure successful service provision for their customers. However, current service science literature has not adequately addressed how these activities differ from each other. Focusing solely on IT service management and ignoring service governance aspects may cause difficulties in measuring the performance of service management, defining and deploying the roles and responsibilities of service management, allocating the resources for right service improvements and adopting the service-oriented process culture. The research problem of this study is: How does IT service management differ from IT service governance? The main contribution of the study is a framework for IT service governance and a roadmap of IT service management frameworks and standards that can be utilized in establishing IT service governance activities. The theory-based framework is validated in an IT service change management case study with five Finnish IT service provider organizations. The results of this study may be used by top management, service directors and the IT service managers of IT service companies to better identify different aspects of IT service management and IT service governance.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN INNOVATIVE AHP-BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM IN THE FIELD OF IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT

The order in which service engineers in the field of IT service management decide to resolve incidents is crucial considering the impact it has on the business performance of the IT service provider. A possible solution to reduce negative impacts is to support service engineers by means of a decision support system that calculates priorities for the incidents based on their business impact. Considering these priorities in their decisions, service engineers can help reduce such negative impacts on the IT service provider’s business. The aim of this study was to incorporate the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method into a software tool to prioritize incidents according to the severity of their business impact. As a result, a decision support system called Incident Prioritizer (IP) was developed. It uses the AHP method to calculate priorities for incidents based on typical criteria that are relevant in the field of IT service management to assess the business impact of incidents. These criteria are commonly defined by the management of an IT service provider organization, and reflect the management’s understanding of the business impact that is caused by incidents. The results suggest that the AHP method can be successfully applied for the given problem of incident prioritization. The prioritization is facilitated by an AHP decision model that consists of only one level of criteria and considers judgments from human beings as well as data from external information systems. http://dx.doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v7i1.284

Integrating IT service management requirements into the organizational management system

IT service provider organizations that have implemented a Quality Management System (QMS) according to ISO 9001 can take advantage of all the efforts made when implementing an IT Service Management System (ITSMS). In order to facilitate the integration of these two management systems, we analyze the existing relations between the requirements of the QMS and the ITSMS. Based on these results, we provide a new Integrated Management System (IMS) which widens the scope of the ISO 9001 QMS with the specific IT service management requirements of ISO/IEC 20000-1, and present a guide to support organizations in implementing this IMS.

COLLECTIVE PROBLEM SOLVING USING SOCIAL COMPUTE UNITS

Service process orchestration using workflow technologies has led to significant improvements in generating predicable outcomes by automating tedious manual tasks but suffer from challenges related to the flexibility required in work especially when humans are involved. Recently emerging trends in enterprises to explore social computing concepts have realized value in more agile work process orchestrations but tend to be less predictable with respect to outcomes. In this paper, we use IT services management, specifically, incident management for large scale systems, to investigate the interplay of workflow systems and social computing. We apply a recently introduced concept of social compute units (SCU), and flexible teams sourced based on various parameters such as skills, availability, incident urgency, etc. in the context of resolution of incidents in an IT service provider organization. Results from simulation-based experiments indicate that the combination of SCUs and workflow based processes can lead to significant improvement in key service delivery outcomes, with average resolution time per incident and number of SLO violations being at times as low as 53.7% and 38.1%, respectively of the corresponding values for pure workflow based incident management. Moreover, significant benefits may also be obtained through cross-skilling of practitioners via exposure to new skills in the context of collaborative work.