Marko Jäntti

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.

Service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) framework

The gap between business decision making and software engineering causes inefficiency and quality problems in software development. Software engineers do not understand organizations value creation objectives and their influence on software production and structure. For this reason software does not fulfill the requirements of business and software quality is inadequate too often. The objective of the authors in the service-oriented software engineering project (SOSE) is to develop methods and tools to improve quality and profitability of software development. In this paper the authors described SOSE framework and clarify with examples its phases, utility, and application in pilot projects. SOSE frameworks first activity is to create a well-defined business case. Then, business processes and data concepts are identified, to meet business requirements of the business case, and modelled with informal diagrams like UML and BPML. Finally, the refinement continues with use case maps, system-level services, and business service components. It is proposed that service, process, entity, and utility components are used as design elements of the business service component. In implementation platform independent and platform specific models were utilized. This study has been carried out in cooperation with ICT companies and their customers in electricity domain 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.

Defining Requirements for an Incident Management System: A Case Study

An incident management process is performed by the service desk that acts as contact point to the users and customers. The service desk records each incident (a failure report or a service request) reported by a user or a customer in the incident management system. Many IT organizations are interested in establishing an incident management system (IMS) that is compliant with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management framework. In this study, we aim to answer the research question is: what types of requirements should be taken account in building an incident management system. Lessons learned from a tool specification project in healthcare domain are presented. An effective IMS should be capable of handling incidents, service requests, problems and requests for change (RFCs); enable relating several incidents and RFCs to one problem; have a public known error database; and contain information on service level agreements.

Lessons Learnt from the Improvement of Customer Support Processes: A Case Study on Incident Management

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely used IT service management framework that provides guidelines how to create, manage and support IT services. Service support processes, such as incident management and problem management, are among the first ITIL processes that organizations start to implement. However, several challenges may exist in the process implementation. The research question of this study is: which issues are important in establishing an ITIL-based incident management process? The main contribution of this paper is to present lessons learnt from an ITIL-based process improvement project that focused on establishing an incident management process in an IS department of a university hospital. Our results show that key issues in implementing incident management are to 1) define the basic concepts of incident management with concrete examples and 2) define process interfaces between incident management and other support processes.

Improving Incident Management Processes in Two IT Service Provider Companies

Many IT service provider organizations are interested in using IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework to improve the quality of customer support. ITIL is a collection of best practices for IT service management. However, many organizations consider the improvement of service management processes as a challenging task. The research problem of this study is: How incident management can be improved in IT service provider companies by using the ITIL framework? The main contribution of this paper is to present results from a case study with two IT service provider organizations that established an ITIL-based incident management processes to improve their customer support activities.

Improving Release and Patch Management Processes: An Empirical Case Study on Process Challenges

An original source- and load-pull topology based on a passive technique is presented in this paper. The proposed system consists of passive tuners and loop structures. The use of a passive loop structure in cascade with a passive tuner allows for synthesis of reflection coefficients in the order of 0.97 magnitudes at the device under tests access plane. The measurement and characterization results of a 1W GaAs MESFET device show an improvement of 0.9 dB in the gain and 6% in the power-added efficiency when the proposed impedance synthesis techniques are used.Implementing release management and patch management processes effectively are challenges for both IT companies and IT customer organizations. Patch management is an essential sub process of release management within overall software maintenance. The research problem in this study is what types of challenges are related to release management and patch management processes and how the common pitfalls could be avoided. Data for the case study were collected from an information technology (IT) company and an IT department of IT customer organization, which apply IT Infrastructure Library framework (ITIL). The main contribution of the paper is to describe the real-world challenges regarding the release and patch management processes and present the lessons learned with proposed improvements.

Difficulties in establishing a defect management process: a case study

A well-organized defect management process is one of the success factors for implementing software projects in time and in budget. The defect management process includes defect prevention, defect discovery and resolution, defect causal analysis, and the process improvement. However, establishing an organization-wide defect management process is a complicated task. The main research question in this paper is what kind of difficulties organizations have regarding the defect management process. Our findings show that problems are related to defect resolution reports, limited project resources for fixing defects, and challenges in creating a test environment. Results are based on our observations from four case organizations. The main contribution of this study is to help organizations to identify and avoid typical problems with defect management.

Identifying Knowledge Management Challenges in a Service Desk: A Case Study

Service desk plays a central role within IT service management. The main goal of the service desk is to record failure reports and service requests from software users and customers. The main contribution of this study is to present knowledge management challenges in the service desk function of a large IT service provider company in Finland. Data for this study were collected through interviews with 31 service desk workers. Several challenges were identified in the service desk work. Challenges were related to incident classification, quality of instruction documents, automatization of incident and order processes, escalation of incidents and the interface between incident management and problem management.

A Conceptual Model of IT Service Problem Managementz

IT service providers need a systematic problem management model to handle problems in IT services effectively. However, many IT organizations have difficulties in establishing a problem management model that is suitable for a service-oriented business. This is due to complex IT service management standards that include a large number of new concepts, which partly overlap with those of traditional software engineering. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model which clarifies the concepts within IT service problem management, and connects these concepts to traditional software engineering tasks, such as testing and defect management. A design pattern is used to document our model. This study has been carried out in co-operation with IT companies and their customers in the electricity domain in Finland