Management of Large-Scale e-Infrastructures at LRZ

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.

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.

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 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.

Continuously Improving IT Service Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry

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.

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.

A framework and associated metrics and measures that can be used to measure the performance of IT service management with an accompanying contingency theory of IT service management.

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.

The starting point is the question, why IT security management and IT service management (ITSM) must be integrated at all? Reasons are provided and discussed. ITIL defines practices for the ITSM and is used as a reference. Fourteen ITIL core areas and processes are summarized and assigned to the ESARIS areas in order to provide a sound basis (Sect. 5.1). ITIL is security-aware and comprises a dedicated Information Security Management process. It is shown that more is required. The role of the Security Management organization requires a change. Based on this division of labor between Security Management and IT business departments a staged model for integrating IT security in IT service management activities is presented (Sect. 5.2). Two examples are used to show how the integration of IT security management on the one hand and IT service management (ITIL) on the other should actually be done. New activities need to be added to the ITIL processes or even to the process map in order to make sure that the specific requirements of managing security are met. The ITIL processes dominate the industrialized IT production. In this environment, processes are important elements that exactly specify all steps in advance which need to be carried out by employees. Security activities need to be integrated. The discussion of the two examples shows how this is accomplished in practice (Sect. 5.3).

The problem we address is that researchers have insufficiently investigated the processes and nuances of Business and IT alignment. One attempt to tackle Business and IT alignment in a process-oriented way is to adopt the concept of IT Service Management (ITSM). However, identified challenges entails that ITSM is hard to define and that existing ITSM frameworks sometimes are considered as overly complex containing an extensive process scope, making it costly and hard to implement. The purpose of this workshop paper is to understand in what way are ITSM core processes supporting business and IT alignment? Our qualitative research approach embraced a two-phase method based on empirical studies where identified core processes were mapped using the Strategic Alignment Model. The result shows that the core of ITSM consists of five processes and that these processes somewhat constitute the bridges and interfaces that aligns Business and IT.KeywordsStrategic alignment modelSAMIT service managementITSM