Antti Lahtela

Implementing an ITIL-Based IT Service Management Measurement System

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides guidelines for IT service providers how to design, manage and support IT services. ITIL is the most widely used IT service management framework. It consists of best practices that can be used in implementing, for example service support processes, such as incident management and problem management. Although ITIL includes a wide list of process metrics, it does not provide sufficient information how IT service management process measurements should be done in practice. The research problem in this paper is how the measurement of the IT service support processes can be improved? In this paper, an ITIL-based IT service management measurement system (ITSM-MS) and its implementation project are presented. The ITSM-MS can be used to measure the performance of IT service support processes. The ITSM-MS was developed in cooperation between MaISSI (Managing IT Services and Service Implementation) research project and an IT service company in Finland.

Challenges and problems in release management process: A case study

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely used IT service management framework and a de facto standard. ITIL provides instructions for IT service providers and organizations how to design, manage and support IT services. However, adopting best practices of ITIL can be difficult for many IT companies. The main contribution of this paper is to present challenges and problems that were identified during a case study focusing on improvement of the release management process. Key challenges included the lack of process description, too high release distribution rate, and poor traceability between incident records and release records.

Improving IT Service Management Processes: A Case Study on IT Service Support

IT services and IT service management play a very important role in the today’s IT industry. Software as service approach enables IT customers to focus on using the software while IT service providers take care of the installation, configuration, support and maintenance activities. Various process frameworks can be used to improve IT service management processes. The most widely used IT service management framework is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) that provides best practices for IT service providers on how to design, manage and support IT services. Despite the IT service management process frameworks, implementing an effective service support interface between an IT service provider and an IT customer is a big challenge. The research problem in this study is: what types of challenges are related to the service support interface between an IT service provider and IT customers. The main contribution of this paper is present challenges in a service support interface identified during a case study with a large IT service provider company in Finland.

Effects of Automated Dose-Dispensing System on Medication Management Process

Medication management process in a hospital includes all the work that is done concerning to a certain patient’s medical treatment. According to international studies, the process is very prone to errors, which can cause adverse drug events and endanger the patient safety. In this paper, we will show how medication management process can be improved by a user-centric and computer-based automated dose-dispensing system. We will focus on the changes in medication management process, when the automated dose-dispensing system is implemented into practice. As a result of this implementation, we get a model for decision-making in medication management process and several benefits, like hygienic medication doses, smaller medication warehouses at wards and in the pharmacy. Additionally with the automated dose-dispensing system, pharmacists have to review patients’ medication regimen before dispensing medications in order to identify possible interactions. However, during medication dispensing in the hospital pharmacy, error rate was discovered to be 0.36%. In wards the error rate was 0.013%. Regardless of these, the use reliability of the ADDS was noticed to be 100%.

Automated identification system for medication care process — Part I: System specification

The aim of healthcare is that a patient always gets best treatment without any complications or errors. Information technology helps healthcare professionals to achieve this goal. However, professionals are often working under a heavy workload with scarce recourses. This may result in human errors that can affect the patient safety, for example a patient receives wrong medications during medication administration. In this paper we will describe an automated identification system for the medication care process in a hospital environment. The system will reduce medication errors and increase the patient safety by automating the identification process of patients and their medications. We will focus on the medication care process, on automated identification technologies, and how we will integrate these two for a new automated identification system in healthcare.