DESERV IT: A Method for Devolving Service Tasks in IT Services

The effective management of IT infrastructure in educational institutions is critical for supporting seamless academic and administrative operations in an increasingly digital environment. Universities and colleges face challenges such as frequent IT service disruptions, inefficient incident management, and the lack of standardized service delivery processes. This paper explores the application of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework as a structured approach to IT Service Management (ITSM) within higher education institutions. By analyzing existing incidents, service requests, and operational inefficiencies, the study identifies key areas where ITIL principles can improve service efficiency, reduce system downtime, and enhance overall user satisfaction among students, faculty, and staff.The research employs qualitative methodologies, including focus groups and structured interviews with IT administrators, academic personnel, and students, to assess IT infrastructure challenges and service management needs. Additionally, the study investigates the impact of modern ITSM tools, such as Jira Service Management, in automating service workflows, tracking incidents, and improving resolution times. A comparative analysis of IT service performance before and after ITIL implementation highlights significant improvements in response efficiency, proactive monitoring, and structured service request handling. Findings indicate that adopting ITIL-based service management practices leads to enhanced IT operations through improved resource allocation, automated incident tracking, and data-driven decision-making. Standardizing workflows and implementing proactive IT monitoring strategies enable universities to mitigate recurring technical issues and optimize IT support services. The study concludes with recommendations for the effective adoption of ITIL frameworks in higher education institutions, emphasizing the long-term benefits of IT governance, continuous service improvement, and user-centric IT service delivery.

The main objective of the Service Level Management process is to ensure that an agreed level of IT service is provided for all current IT services and that future services are delivered to agreed achievable targets. The number of agreed SLAs has rapidly increased in the IT industry while more and more IT customers have become aware of Service Level Management best practices. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely used IT service management framework that provides best practices for implementing IT service management processes including Service Level Management. The research problem of this study is: how Service Level Agreements can be implemented with an IT service management tool. We use a combination of IT service management and knowledge management approach to study the problem. The main contribution of this paper is to present results of a case study that focused on improving Service Level Management practices in a Finnish IT service provider company Tieto.

Continual service improvement within IT service management is an important research topic. Nowadays, IT services should be actively developed and improved in order to increase quality and cost effectiveness. Continual Service Improvement enables identification of bottlenecks and weak areas in the services. The research problem of this study is: what types of challenges exist in the IT service management from IT service provider's perspective? The main contribution of this study is to present ITSM challenges in two IT service provider companies in Finland. In order to categorize results, we used the three core perspectives of ITSM people, process, and technology. These three areas provide inputs to the continual service improvement lifecycle phase which controls and manages the identified improvements. Data for this study were mainly collected through interviews with 21 IT service management specialists.

IT service catalogs are a pivotal element for managing IT services in many organizations, in accordance with common practice IT service management frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library. However, both in theory and practice, IT service catalogs are underspecified as much emphasis is put on the structure and content of the catalogs while the use and integration into IT service management processes are often neglected. Consequentially, the aim of the present paper is to propose a maturity model for IT service catalogs that covers structure and content as well as use and integration. This advances our understanding of this pivotal artifact in many IT service management systems and helps practitioners to identify improvement potentials for their IT service catalog-related practices.

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.

Information Technology can play a significant role in supporting and even driving sustainability strategies in an organization. However, many small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) often separate their “Green IT” initiatives from existing business and IT strategy. The authors describe how one SME used IT service management (ITSM) to clarify and improve their IT services and to integrate sustainability into the IT function. Their case provides a detailed description of ITSM and also shows that ITSM offers a framework for SMEs to integrate sustainability into the IT operations.

The article presents metrics for managing IT services in a service-oriented architecture of the information system. Cognitive management of the effectiveness of IT services is considered on a variety of ICT infrastructure management metrics, information system management metrics, IT service management metrics. The necessary components of the formation of an analytical platform for the cognitive management of IT services in the EIM environment for SAP BI (Business Objects Business Intelligent) are considered. A model of cognitive management of IT services using key performance indicators (KPIs) for managing IT service metrics is presented.

IT service management and incident management is a hot topic in every company which serves IT services and they require human effort to manage. In ITIL framework for IT service management, it's always useful to link the incidents with configuration items, in other words the assets or components necessary to deliver IT services and this task is managed manually by IT support technicians in many IT service management tools. The aim of the study is to remove this manual linking step by applying text classification methods and instead to provide an automatic assignment of CI's to incidents. Four of the text classification methods, Naive Bayes Multinomial, k-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine and J48 decision tree classifiers, are used on three different sets of incidents extracted from the same database by using different filters. The impact of some pre-processing steps is compared on different sizes of datasets.

IT Service Management System is an application to implement and manage Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices framework. This framework aims to align the IT services with the business needs by insuring the quality of services provided to business. This IT service Management system links people, processes and technology within the Central Bank of Sudan as the main site of the project. The Central Bank of Sudan is the main bank that governs Sudan's banks rules and regulations. The bank was formed in 1960 with headquarters located in the Khartoum capital of Sudan in addition to eighteen (18) branches spread throughout the country. The Information Technology Administration within the Central Bank of Sudan manage and operate the IT infrastructure that host and support all systems that used internally and for external banks. The objective of this study focused on finding IT service management system that can support international IT service management platform that can apply ITIL standard processes like Incident Management, Service Request Management, Problem Management, Change Request Management, Configuration Management Database and Knowledge Management. The methodology used in this system is the Rapid Application Development (RAD), a condensed development process that produces a high quality system with low investment costs. The proposed system went through to alpha, beta and acceptability tests by IT development team first and second line of support agents to ensure proper module functionality with favorable results. The study concluded in align services provided by the Information system department with business need through manageable and controllable standard. As a recommendation, the system should be implemented at the Central Bank of Sudan. More integrations and benchmarking must be done to ensure modules functionalities and higher security. The system can be the first step to take ISO20000 certificate as it covers many of IS020000 requirements.

Business process management (BPM) is an approach focused on the continuous improvement of business processes, providing for this a collection of best practices. These best practices enable the redesign of business processes to meet the desired performance. IT service management (ITSM) defines the management of IT operations as a service. There are several ITSM frameworks available, consisting in best practices that propose standardizing these processes for the respective operations. By adopting these frameworks, organisations can align IT with their business objectives. The constant need for change, competitiveness and innovation in organisations compels managers to analyse its business processes and find improvement opportunities. Therefore, the objective of this research is to understand how BPM can be used to improve of ITSM processes. An exploratory case study in a multinational company based in Lisbon, Portugal, is conducted for the improvement of the time performance of an incident management process. Data were gained through documentation, archival records, interviews and focus groups with a team involved in IT support service. The results of this study demonstrate how BPM highlighted the current incident management process incongruences. The preliminary evidences of this research indicate that with the application of the remain BPM lifecycle phases may be possible to improve incident management process. During the next months the authors intend to identify the main problems and simulate the appropriate BPM heuristics to understand the impact in the business organisation.

Continuously Improving IT Service Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Based on the best-practice framework ITIL, an IT service catalog is a system which displays all live IT services but does not manage service requests. Moreover, an IT service catalog also shows how IT services are technically realized. When implementing an IT service catalog as part of the IT service management, firms often struggle with service catalog implementation projects as it requires portfolio-wide information and knowledge about service design, service operations, the customers' use of services, service level agreements and service costing. There is a lack of existing literature on how to design an IT service catalog to fit the individual context and service offerings of companies. This concise paper proposes an approach based on design science for defining the initial design requirements for IT service catalogs. Using this approach in practice resulted in the identification and scoping of the design objectives of IT service catalogs to the needs of individual firms. Moreover, the explorative knowledge on how to design an IT service catalog has been validated by following rigorous research guidelines set out by the design science research method.

The problems of development and construction of a universal consolidated strategy of interaction of IT services and information security, which is based on the study and in-depth analysis of statistics on the current situation with the interaction of corporate IT services and security in different international companies in different industries and countries, are considered. specialists, experts and analysts. The subject of research in the article is the issue of optimal interaction of IT and security services in ensuring a high level of corporate information security in the EMEA region. The goal is to analyze the issues related to the construction and implementation of consolidated strategies for IT and security management in order to eliminate inconsistencies and increase the efficiency of the relevant services to ensure effective information security of organizations on the example of the EMEA region. Objectives: processing and analysis of the results of an online survey on the interaction of IT and security services of companies and organizations in various industries in different countries and regions of the world, including the EMEA region; research of problems and advantages of building a consolidated strategy of IT management and information security in the EMEA region; development of recommendations for solving existing problems in the development and construction of corporate strategies for effective IT management and information security. The general scientific method of systems analysis is used to determine the features of interaction between IT services and security of companies and organizations of different industries in different regions of the world, as well as to study the problems and benefits of a unified consolidated IT management strategy and information security. The following results were obtained: based on quantitative and qualitative assessment, as well as analysis of the results of the survey of IT and security specialists and experts in the EMEA region, the participation of companies in the development and implementation of information security strategies was determined; the main tasks of IT and security services in the organization of their joint work and coordination of actions among themselves are defined; the main obstacles in the organization of joint work of IT services and security services of companies are investigated, among which significant are tensions and conflicts between employees of services, global and regional shortage of qualified personnel, technical difficulties. Conclusions: it is established that the consolidated strategy of IT management and information security based on advances in security and technology can help solve the main problems of effective interaction of relevant company services; developed a number of recommendations to address existing problems of building corporate strategies for effective IT management and information security, designed to help eliminate inconsistencies and improve the efficiency of relevant services to ensure effective information security of organizations in the EMEA in various organizations and companies, regardless of their field of activity.

IT Service Management (ITSM) is transforming the management of the IT function on a global scale with major changes in work practices. The intent of this study is to empirically explore how IT service management is adopted in today's global economy. The article examines the adoption of ITSM processes as defined in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). The adoption of operational processes is compared to that of tactical/strategic level processes and the contribution of country, size, and industry sector to variation in adoption of ITIL processes is assessed. Institutional theory is used as a foundation for the study. The analysis is based on 623 responses to three surveys conducted in the UK, USA, DACH (German-speaking countries) and Australia.

The IT infrastructure library (ITIL) provides clarity to IT service management and its processes. ICO 20000 further describes the responsibilities of service providers operating in ITIL conformant environment. However, neither one specifically addresses external service providers' challenges that arise in a cost conserving operational model when service provider is supporting multiple customers using shared resources. This paper provides a summary of a required extension to the service provider domain for an IT service management (ITSM) solution with ITIL conformant core.