Implementing IT Service Management: A Case Study Focussing On Critical Sucess Factors

by Wui-Gee Tan, Aileen Cater-Steel and Mark Toleman

This paper discusses an implemented centralized IT service management model based on the ITIL framework. It outlines the challenges and breakthroughs and confirms a set of factors contributing to a projects success while offering a learning opportunity for other organizations.

In order for a project to succeed it is important to have the commitment of senior management, a project champion should be appointed and the recognition for a change management strategy needs to be prepared.

The critical success approach was established to outline a set of critical success factors "where things must go right in order to successfully achieve objectives and goals." This list is made up of 22 CFSs.

From this article I have learnt that

Towards TQM in IT Services

by Xian Chen and Paul Sorenson

This paper addresses the problem of total quality management (TQM) in IT services followed by a review of quality definitions from the four levels of perspectives. 

TQM is a strategy used to improve IT system quality, this can be defined in the four step system quality improvement cycle; Plan, Do, Check and Act. Adapting these steps will help measure and improve IT services.

The definition of quality is hard to measure when discussing the quality of service in IT services. In order to develop a better understanding quality has been divided into four perspectives. The four perspectives are; Conformance Quality, Gap Quality, Value Quality and Excellence Quality. Conformance Quality is internally defined and concerned with the performance and original design specification. Gap Quality very complex to explain, it is the most pervasive definition of quality in business management, it is partially related to quality improvement. Value Quality reflects value and benefits to customers, it is a universal measure but widely different with different types of objects. Excellence Quality stresses that features and characteristics of quality are excellent.

Basically the TQM process improves quality processes by exploring the approach to manage different levels of quality improvements using the above four different perspectives to define quality in IT services.

An Overview of IT Service Management

By Stuart D. Galup, Ronald Dattero, Jim J. Quan and Sue Conger

This article focuses on the subtopic, Service Science which deals with the management of ICT service operations. ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) is a subset of Service Science; it focuses on IT operations such as service delivery and service support.

Often ITSM is associated with ITIL, ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and was designed a "framework of best practices intended to facilitate the delivery of high quality IT services at adjustable cost." ITIL is a subsection of ITSM that concentrates on service support and delivery of IT operations and it is amazing how much is actually spent in these two areas. “Approximately 80% of the cost of infrastructure is in these two areas.” ITIL consists of five publications; Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations, and continual Service Improvement.

ITSM is a developing discipline that focuses on a well-established set of processes. The overall goal of ITSM is to improve IT services in order to satisfy business needs.

Taming the Help Desk

By Geoffrey Sperl

In this study Geoffrey Sperl discusses how he moved from a computer geek to the manager of a team of people at the Computer & Information Technology Help Desk at Wayne State University.

“Plenty of universities and colleges experience the “geek” becoming the manager, unfortunately he or she has usually not been given any training to start with – just staff, a budget, and a handful of directives”.

The first point made is dress attire, the move from “geek” to “manager” meant changing personal styles and tastes.  Wearing a T-shirt and jeans with an unshaven face is not acceptable in such a high position. A person who dresses like this may be just as intelligent as a person in a suit but as humans we do judge a book by its cover.  

Sperl’s suggestions are altered depending on the situation or workplace. For example, if you are in a relaxed workplace, a total wardrobe revamp is not necessary. Polo style shirts come in numerous colours and styles and would be acceptable in this situation. If it is a less relaxed workplace, formal attire is appropriate.

Further to appearance, taming the help desk involves; planning, training, leading and reviewing. Being in control of your helpdesk is important and following these steps will help you become a good manager.

Personally I disagree with the suggestions of dress options, if you are in a managerial role you should dress formally as you will be judged by your work peers and your staff will respect you.

Service Management in Operations

By Sue Conger, MaryAnne Winniford and Lisa Erickson-Harris

Over recent years many frameworks have been introduced to IT organizations, these frameworks are designed to help develop specific service processes for their organizations. Although frameworks such as; ITIL, COBIT and CMMI were designed to help IT organizations, the results of this research survey show that there is significant confusion from IT managers.

There were some interesting results discovered from this survey. One that was particularly interesting to me were that out of 364 individuals asked whether they practiced service management only 45% of companies were using service management. When respondents not utilizing service management were asked to describe the barriers to using service management in their organization, 61% said that there was a need for more information about service management.

This article shows that there are a large number of businesses not using a service management framework. Results show that this is because there is great conceptual confusion. This could be improved with clearer terminology, better definitions and a broader dissemination of framework information. I think that using a service management framework in an organization, especially an IT organization is largely beneficial. So much can go wrong in an IT organization and if there are processes and ways out there to prevent disaster then they should be utilized. 

Mastering IT Change Management Step Two: Moving from Ignorant anarchy to Informed Anarchy

By Ken Dietel

This study examines an IT support organization of approximately 300 people maintaining over 100 systems, implementing 60-75 changes per month. Ken Dietel describes their current management system as; "Ignorant Anarchy". This article focuses on addressing issues when implementing change in an organization and moving the organization from an "Ignorant Anarchy" to an "Informed Anarchy".

Currently the organization was having regular problems such as; multiple users ringing the help desk to report problems that the help desk analysts would research but find no previous record or reasons why the system would be performing this way. The system developers would then report that a change had been implemented and the system was expected to be working this way. This shows that people from the same organization are working interdependently of each other. This can and is causing huge issues.

Change Management processes were implemented to change the overall process flow. "This started with a change request being submitted, then approved, reviewed, announced and finally implemented". This made a huge difference to the overall process as managers were used to having no standard at all.

Through the process of trying to change the state of the organization it was learned that the change review meetings were not effective, this is because there were just too many participants to understand the implications of the requested changes. From this a Core Change Team was defined.

It was hard to get people to change their habits but the process of changing from ignorant anarchy to "Informed Anarchy" was successful.

If there is a need or opportunity for improvement in how an organization can achieve greater work, they should attempt it. This article proves that improvement can be made to a whole organizations structure and production by changing the way things are done.

~Luisa Zigliani

You want us to Support WHAT?!? negotiation, Delivery, and Cultivation: The Gateway to Excellent Service Deployment

By Nathan Carpenter and Ryan Tucker

"The introduction of new services is inevitable. Providing excellent support requires collaboration from the early planning stages through implementation and beyond."

This article emphasizes the importance of communication and collaboration between service managers and the Help Desk. A relationship needs to be built between these two parties for an IT organization to roll out a successful new service.

The Help Desk is the face of the organization and must be advocate to their customers; they are expected to be able to correctly address concerns and questions from people. Help Desk Representatives build the company’s reputation and it is vital that they know what they are talking about.

This is where the term "being at the table" comes in. "Being at the table" changes the way help desk representatives are involved in discussions revolving around the project. A help desk representative is now assigned to nearly every major project served by a company; here they serve as both an advocate for the help desk and all their customers.

I think that the idea of "being at the table" is excellent. If the Help Desk representatives are not informed they could be giving out false information, making customers more confused than they were before. I think keeping help desk representatives informed as well as keeping a strong relationship is the way to build a successful company.

After reading this article; it is good to see that times are changing and improvements on communication and management are being made. People cannot perform their jobs well if they don't know what’s going on behind the scenes.

~Luisa