Improving Service Level Management Practices: A Case Study in an IT Service Provider Organization

IT companies worldwide have started to improve their service management processes based on best practice frameworks, such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). However, many of these companies face difficulties in demonstrating the positive outcomes of IT service management (ITSM) process improvement. This has led us to investigate the research problem: What positive impacts have resulted from IT service management process improvement? The main contributions of this paper are 1) to identify the ITSM process improvement outcomes in two IT service provider organizations and 2) provide advice as lessons learnt.KeywordsIT service managementserviceIT Infrastructure Libraryprocess improvementprocess

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.

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.

Integrating IT service management requirements into the organizational management system

The modern business environment and global covid-19 pandemic effects have led to any relevant business organizational activity, like e-commerce, to rely on on-premise and cloud information technology (IT) services. To deliver high-quality IT services, plan-driven IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks and standards have been used in business organizations in the last two decades. Nowadays, new and claimed agile ITSM frameworks and standards have emerged but there is a scarcity of studies on their extent of agility coverage. This research addresses this knowledge gap. First, we elaborated a plausible Integrative Agile ITSM Framework of Tenets and Practices from a selective review of the main related SwE and ITSM literature. Second, we populated the integrative framework with all available evidence about the agile tenets and practices reported in the official publications of the new five ITSM frameworks and standards. Third, we explored its utilization with a Panel of ITSM Experts for ranking how much the new five ITSM frameworks and standards fit the integrative framework. Exploratory results revealed high concordance among experts to qualify ITIL v4 and VeriSM as agile, and FitSM, and the two ISO/IEC standards as lightweight but not agile. This research contributes to the ITSM literature with an Integrative Agile ITSM Framework of Tenets and Practices, and the ITSM practice with an exploratory evaluation from ITSM experts on the adherence to it from the new five ITSM frameworks and standards. Given the critical dependence of any business activity on IT services, further theoretical and empirical research is worthy to be pursued.

Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an important document to facilitate IT service provisioning by clearly defined Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The management of SLA is the main subject in the discipline of Service Level Management (SLM) . SLM is very important to improve relationship between IT service provider and its customer. It delivers documented agreement as a common understanding of expectation and possible achievements to the agreed cost. It means SLM builds the interface between an IT organization and its cust omer, so it plays a critical and important role in the context of IT service management. In this paper, an SLM best practice from CISCO will be analyzed with the assessment criteria of SLM framework by Thomas Schaaf. The result will be followed with several suggestion to fulfil the gap in this CISCO’s best practice.

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.

A growing number of organizations are implementing the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) “best practice” framework in an attempt to improve their IT service management processes. However, not all ITIL implementations are successful and some companies have been disappointed with the outcomes. This exploratory research reports on four case studies of “successful” implementations of IT service management using the process-based ITIL V2 framework. Two companies are located in the U.S. and two in Australia. The cases demonstrate a mix of implementation justifications and strategies. Critical success factors (CSFs) suggested in the literature are compared against those attributed to these successful ITIL implementations. Some CSFs, including executive management support, interdepartmental communication and collaboration, use of consultants, training and careful software selection are confirmed. Three new CSFs are identified: creating an ITIL-friendly culture, process as a priority, and customer-focused metrics. Practitioner guidelines, to assist IT managers, who are contemplating adopting ITIL for process improvement and organisational transformation, are also provided together with some challenges encountered and their associated resolutions.

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.

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.

Enterprises and service providers are increasingly looking to process-based automation as a means of containing and even reducing the labor costs of systems management. However, it is often hard to quantify and predict the additional complexity introduced by IT service management processes before they actually have been deployed. Our approach consists in looking at this problem from a different, new perspective by regarding complexity as a surrogate for potential labor cost and human-error-induced problems: In order to effectively evaluate the benefits of IT service management processes – and to target the types of processes that contribute most to management complexity and cost – we need a set of metrics for quantifying the complexity and human cost of carrying out IT service management processes. This paper proposes such measures, and demonstrates how they can be applied to a typical service delivery process in order to assess its complexity hotspots as a basis for process re-engineering.

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.

Continuously Improving IT Service Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry