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.