The Design of IT Services

Introduction

The modern concept of service has been defined as “the application of competences for the benefit of another, meaning that service is a kind of action, performance, or promise that’s exchanged for value between provider and client” (Spohrer et al., 2007, pp. 72). This concept of service is highly relevant for worldwide economy due to service sectors (e.g., financial, healthcare, education, assurance, legal, engineering, and accounting among others) constitute over 70% of the total gross economic value on average per nation in OECD (IfM and IBM, 2008). This worldwide service economy has fostered the development of a Service Approach paradigm which has permeated to the Informatics discipline (Rai & Sambamurthy, 2006) through the IT Service Management (ITSM) approach. ITSM is defined as a management system of organizational resources and capabilities for providing value to organizational customers through IT services (van Bon et al., 2007). ITSM has become a relevant organizational theme for IT areas in large and mid-sized organizations because it is expected that its adequate utilization, jointly with other IT frameworks/schemes of processes, delivers a more efficient and effective IT management, and ultimately a better organizational value (Gallup et al., 2009).

For this aim, the most important posited ITSM process frameworks are: ISO/IEC 20000 (ISO, 2005; 2010), ITIL v3 (van Bon et al., 2007), CMMI-SVC (SEI, 2010), ITUP® (EMA, 2006; IBM, 2010), and MOF® 4.0 (Microsoft, 2008). Table 1 reports the purpose of each process framework, an outline of phases and indicates which of them are involved with the design of IT services. Table 1 is useful to acquire a 30-mille view regarding these schemes. An ITSM practitioner can rapidly to make sense on the inherent complexity to learn and deploy any selected ITSM process framework. Thus, given that successful ITSM implementations require adequate training and staff awareness (Pollard & Cater-Steel, 2009) besides other critical success factors, potential ITSM implementers need firstly to identify the core structure and characteristics of these ITSM frameworks, in order to realize a correct selection of the most suitable for your organization. Hence, it could be expected that the selection of any ITSM process framework is indifferent. However, while they share a similar generic aim and an outline of phases and activities, they have also particular issues. The nomenclature, phase-activity structure, and granularity level used for their description are lately non-standardized (Dougmore, 2006).