Library of Service Management

Submitted by admin on Thu, 07/13/2006 - 3:52pm.

This section contains a collections of links and documents that are useful and relevant to service management in general. It is set up to work like a wiki format so that you can enrich the collection with your own contributions. Whenever posting any material, please make sure that your comply with copyright laws and the intellectual property rights.


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References
   

 
Cameron A Fisher (2006). Manage digital assets with ITIL: Improve product configurations and service management. Journal of Digital Asset Management, 2(1), 40-49. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1194701911).
      Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) techniques are not widely known for external customer-facing situations. Relatively few marketers are aware of the importance of configuration management to the user experience, service support and overall CRM delivery. New tools and methods available yield significant value from automated inventorying, deployment and management of IT enabled devices.
Dario Forte (2007). Security standardization in incident management: the ITIL approach. Network Security, 2007(1), 14-16. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1210644961).
      You can't throw a stone these days without hitting a standards document claiming to offer the state of the art in IT incident management. Many of them focus on organizational aspects rather than on incident response in the strict sense. In this article we will examine the ITIL approach to incident management. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Nick Robinson (2005). IT excellence starts with governance. The Journal of Investment Compliance, 6(3), 45-49. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1074637001).
      Purpose - To explain how information technology (IT) governance enables an organization to achieve three vital objectives: regulatory and legal compliance, operational excellence, and optimal risk management. Design/methodology/approach - Describes the role in IT governance of functions such as value creation (distilling company's mission and strategic direction into business needs for IT applications), value delivery (formal project management methodology and system development life cycle), value preservation (integrated control and risk management program), resource management, performance management (capability maturity model, balanced scorecard, Six Sigma), and oversight. Describes governance frameworks such as COBIT, ITIL, and ISO/IEC 17799: 2000. Offers advice on getting started. Findings - When governance is effective, IT becomes a valued asset, inseparable from the business and regarded as an asset, not a cost. Originality/value - Helps a compliance officer think about the connection between effective IT and compliance systems.
Ram B Misra (2004). Global IT Outsourcing: Metrics for Success of All Parties. Journal of Information Technology Cases and Applications, 6(3), 21-34. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 768202951).
      This paper presents a strong case for the use of metrics (data that can be measured) in establishing the success of an outsourcing engagement related to information technology (IT) services or IT enabled services (back office business processes). It proposes that the success of an outsourcing engagement should mean the achieving of goals of all three parties - the company that outsources the work (outsourcer), company that is going to perform the outsourced work (outsourcee) and the end user who uses the product or is a beneficiary of the service. With the use of appropriate metrics, the outsourcer and the outsourcee can mutually position themselves for success with the use of appropriate metrics and ensure that the end user needs are met. This paper presents a framework for metrics, then goes on to present the best practices that should be applied in selecting metrics. While making the case of a proper implementation of the selected metrics along with an appropriate system of incentives and rewards, this paper concludes with a discussion of the need for composite reporting metrics duly agreed upon by both outsourcer and outsourcee. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
René Saint-Germain (2005). Information Security Management Best Practice Based on ISO/IEC 17799. Information Management Journal, 39(4), 60-62,64-66. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 874588211).
      Security matters have become an integral part of daily life, and organizations need to ensure that they are adequately secured. A number of best practice frameworks exist to help organizations assess their security risks, implement appropriate security controls, and comply with governance requirements as well as privacy and information security regulations. Organizations today must deal with a multitude of information security risks. Some best practices that facilitate the implementation of security controls include Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), ISO/IEC 17799/BS 7799, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and Operationally Critical Threat, Asset and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE). ISO/IEC 17799 comprises 10 security domains and seeks to address security compliance at all levels: managerial, organizational, legal, operational, and technical. The increasing interest in security frameworks is due to new governance legislation, to a growing awareness of the importance of information security, and to security audit demands by financial institutions and insurance companies.
Alexander Dreiling,  Michael Rosemann,  Wil van der Aalst,  Lutz Heuser,  Karsten Schulz. (2006). Model-based software configuration: patterns and languages. European Journal of Information Systems, 15(6), 583-601. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1192815131).
      The common presupposition of enterprise systems (ES) is that they lead to significant efficiency gains. However, this is only the case for well-implemented ES that are well-aligned with the organisation. The list of ES implementation failures is significant which is partly attributable to the insufficiently addressed fundamental problem of adapting an ES efficiently. As long as it is not intuitively possible to configure an ES, this problem will prevail because organisations have a non-generic character. A solution to this problem consists in re-thinking current practices of ES provision. This paper proposes a new approach based on configurable process models, which reflect ES functionalities. We provide in this paper a taxonomy of situations that can occur from a business perspective during process model configuration. This taxonomy is represented via so-called semantic configuration patterns. In the next step, we discuss so-called syntactic configuration patterns . This second type of configuration patterns implements the semantic configuration patterns for specific modelling techniques. We chose two popular process modelling languages in order to illustrate our approach. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
C H Crawford,  G P Bate,  L Cherbakov,  K Holley,  C Tsocanos. (2005). Toward an on demand service-oriented architecture. IBM Systems Journal, 44(1), 81-107. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 808583161).
      The success of an on demand e-business requires that business process, application, and information technology (IT) infrastructure integration merge into a comprehensive and cohesive architecture, where business process transformation drives service-oriented development and on demand enterprise computing. This enabling architecture is often described as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and is a prerequisite accelerator for on demand solutions. The primary focus of SOA has been on dynamic reconfiguration of services from defined business processes, and on developing business services based on Web services and, more recently, grid services. Current descriptions of SOA are less focused on overall IT infrastructure enablement, both from a business policy perspective and within the context of service-oriented development. In this paper, we extend the current thinking on SOA to include a more comprehensive integration of business process transformation and the enabling technologies of service-oriented development and policy-based IT management. We call this extension on demand SOA. We develop these concepts by using an existing scenario: a financial services sector "Life Change" business process scenario, which involves distributed and disjoint transactions as well as stateless high-performance computing (HPC) applications. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Claudia Loebbecke,  Claudio Huyskens. (2006). What drives netsourcing decisions? An empirical analysis. European Journal of Information Systems, 15(4), 415-423. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1135913771).
      Netsourcing, a rather innovative form of web-enabled value creation, describes outsourcing of selected software applications to external service providers via the Internet. It promises flexibility and cost advantages over operating software applications in-house. However, it also raises the question which software applications corporate users should netsource and which they should keep in-house. To answer these questions, we develop a research framework with seven independent variables derived from the literature on full information technology outsourcing. On data collected in a 2004 survey among the 500 largest German companies, we apply a logistic regression analysis. As a result, we find significant statistical support for strategic management variables and no support for transaction cost economics variables as being relevant to the netsourcing decision. We conclude the paper with some lessons learned and suggestions for further research. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Cornelia Boldyreff,  Marc Drost,  Dave Hinley,  Mike Morrell,  Andy Symons. (1997). A basis for process improvement in application management. Software Quality Journal, 6(2), 99-111. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 979338121).
      While the challenges to the software industry in the 1980s were highly focused on the processes for software development, the challenges for the 1990s and beyond are broader, encompassing all the services associated with the IT needs of the customer. Origin expects the contribution to turnover from Applications Management to be far greater in the coming years than that from 'traditional' software development projects. The Application Management service not only involves different processes, but also requires a more customer-oriented, service-based attitude on the part of the service supplier. However, the basic need to be able to assess the capability of an organization and improve its processes is the same. Anticipating this need, the University of Durham has for some years taken part in the Application Management Environments and Support (AMES) project, supported by the European Community under the ESPRIT programme, project 8156. AMES builds on CMM principles and process modelling for Applications Management. In late 1995 Origin and the University of Durham collaborated in an evaluation of AMES for the Origin situation by carrying out a trial assessment. This paper reports on the results of that trial and sketches our vision for future development. As well as presenting our own experience, we aim to stimulate discussion on the broadening of current developments (such as SPICE) to cover the wider spectrum of IT services.
D E Cox,  H Kreger. (2005). Management of the service-oriented-architecture life cycle. IBM Systems Journal, 44(4), 709-726. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 939370501).
      Service-oriented architecture (SOA) development and deployment generally builds on a service view of the world in which a set of services are assembled and reused to quickly adapt to new business needs. This flexibility is seen by many IT organizations as the core value of SOA and has been driving some deep transformations in the way software is being built. Although SOA technology addresses many of the traditional problems of integrating disparate business processes and applications, deploying service-based applications introduces new aspects of the information technology (IT) environment that must be managed. These new aspects include developing and testing applications composed of operational services, deploying and provisioning distributed service-based applications across organizational boundaries in a secure, reliable, and repeatable manner, and tracking the business impact of services on the business processes that those services support. This paper describes the management capabilities needed to ensure that an SOA fulfills its promise of increasing integration and improving business adaptability. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
David Bigio,  Rick L Edgeman,  Thomas Ferleman. (2004). Six Sigma Availability Management of Information Technology in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer of Washington, DC. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 15(5,6), 679-687. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 669784301).
      Imagine the potential implications of a well-timed and successful terrorist strike that begins by crippling the information technology infrastructure of the government of Washington, DC. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) of the Government of the District of Columbia (Washington, DC) is largely funded by the United States Congress and is the primary information technology resource for critical government agencies in 'the District' including the Police Department, Public Works, Fire and Rescue, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and Public Schools. OCTO would serve a critical function in any large city; given, however, that the District is perhaps the most politically and militarily important city in the world, that function is amplified. In early 2003, OCTO engaged multiple interdisciplinary teams from the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the A. James Clark School of Engineering of the University of Maryland to examine strategies and tactics employed by OCTO with respect to the Information Technology Internet Library (ITIL) Service Delivery. Explicit team charges were to conduct these examinations through either the lens of 'business excellence' or the lens of six sigma's structured define-measure-analyse-improve-control (DMAIC) improvement approach with particular emphasis on 'DMA' and with suggestions for 'I'. These examinations were intended to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in and to OCTO's ITIL Service Delivery approaches and, subsequently, to enhance OCTO's performance. The work described herein was limited to a Six Sigma examination of ITIL Service Delivery Availability Management and was hence a part of the larger ITIL framework. Ultimately the work will contribute to fulfilment of OCTO's goal of derivation and implementation of a dynamic cost and performance modelling environment that coalesces disparate information technology (IT) data sources into a solution capable of spanning all agency operational needs. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Johnny C F So,  Narasimha Bolloju. (2005). Explaining the intentions to share and reuse knowledge in the context of IT service operations. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(6), 30-41. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 978464351).
      This paper aims to provide an understanding on IS/IT professionals intentions to share and reuse knowledge in the context of information technology service operations. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) is applied for examining IS/IT professionals' intention to share and reuse knowledge. The data were collected from working IS/IT professionals using an online survey and partial least squares was used for analyzing the data. The results from this study indicate that the theory of planned behavior is an adequate model for investigating behavioral intentions of knowledge sharing and reuse in the context of information technology service operations. All direct determinants of intention to share knowledge, except subjective norm regarding information technology service operations knowledge sharing, and intention to reuse knowledge were significant. This paper attempts to highlight the importance of information technology service operations in the IS/IT industry and study knowledge management in that context. To encourage knowledge sharing, top management is advised that they should focus on building up a positive attitude in their employees, through improving relationships and recognition of their contributions.
Jos J.M. Trienekens,  Jacques J. Bouman,  Mark van der Zwan. (2004). Specification of Service Level Agreements: Problems, Principles and Practices. Software Quality Journal, 12(1), 43-57. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 979339211).
      Software intensive systems (SIS) increasingly influence the ability of enterprises to be competitive in continuously changing market situations. The integration of these systems into organizations, and in particular the subsequent exploitation, maintenance and service activities, have become of utmost importance. Unfortunately the area of exploitation and operation, also known as service management, is still rather immature. Service management covers services such as performance and availability support, end-user and help desk support, education, and maintenance. One of the main concepts of service management is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The goal of an SLA is to bridge the gap between service provider and users or customers. However, there exist many problems and unsolved questions regarding the specification and the quantification of SLAs. This paper addresses the specification of SLAs on the basis of three well-founded service management principles, respectively: 'continuity in service management,' the pit/shell principle of a service, and the principle of specifying the quality of both a service process and a service object. Finally, the paper addresses the validation of these principles in practice.
M Lynne Markus,  Ulric J Gelinas Jr. (2006). Comparing the Standards Lens with Other Perspectives on IS Innovations: The Case of CPFR. International Journal of IT Standards & Standardization Research, 4(1), 24-42. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 939023781).
      Conceptual labels influence researchers' observations and analytic insights. This article aims to clarify the contributions of standards label by contrasting it with other ways of viewing the same entity and applying it to the IT-enabled supply chain innovation of Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR). Proponents have labeled CPFR not only as a standard but also, at different decreasing levels of abstraction, as a business philosophy, methodology, and set of technologies. By comparing the analytic leverage offered by the different labels, we conclude that there is value in combining the standards perspective with other conceptual lenses. The specific case of CPFR also raises an interesting question for future research: Can information systems innovations justifiably be considered standardized in practice, if they are not standardized at all relevant levels of abstraction? [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
R Khalaf,  A Keller,  F Leymann. (2006). Business processes for Web Services: Principles and applications. IBM Systems Journal, 45(2), 425-446. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1068478781).
      The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL for short) is an XML-based language for defining business processes that provides an interoperable, portable language for both abstract and executable processes and that was designed from the beginning to operate in the heterogeneity and dynamism that is commonplace in information technology today. BPEL builds on the layers of flexibility provided by the Web Services stack, and especially by XML. In this paper, we provide a brief introduction to BPEL with emphasis on architectural drivers and basic concepts. Then we survey ongoing BPEL work in several application areas: adding quality of service to BPEL, extending BPEL to activities involving humans, BPEL for grid computing, and BPEL for autonomic computing. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Susan Reiblein,  Andy Symons. (1997). SPI: 'I can't get no satisfaction' - directing process improvement to meet business needs. Software Quality Journal, 6(2), 89-98. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 979338111).
      IT managers commonly complain of lack of resources for Software Process Improvement (SPI) projects. The authors postulate that this comes from lack of understanding by the company board of the benefit of SPI, and perhaps a lack of understanding by IT managers of the needs of the company board? So how can IT managers obtain satisfaction? A shortcoming of the ISO-9001 and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) approaches to process improvement (in software production) is the lack of explicit connection to the business goals of the organization in question. In the eyes of business management, therefore, these models appear to represent an 'idealized' view of the world. A negative assessment against such a model is insufficient, in itself, to justify significant expenditure on an improvement plan. While a standardized model is invaluable as a common reference for measurement and comparison, the initiation of a meaningful improvement plan requires investment of money and allocation of resources; and that can only take place if current business goals, not an 'ideal' model, are the motivating force. The draft SPICE method has recognized this need. It proposes the comparison of an assessed capability profile with a target capability profile. However the current draft standard (version 2.0) contains little guidance on how to arrive at such a target capability profile. This paper describes a method for drawing up such a target capability profile. To preserve clarity, we have placed the description of our method in the context of a SPICE assessment and process improvement, but the method would also be suitable for use with ISO, CMM, ITIL or other process models.1 In all cases an improvement plan can be set up which is visibly geared to the business goals.
Tuncay Bayrak,  Martha R Brabowski. (2006). CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE NETWORK EVALUATION. The Journal of Computer Information Systems, 46(3), 67-86. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1038730641).
      Network performance evaluation is an increasingly important component of critical infrastructure analysis. With the recent interest in assessing the safety, security, integrity and robustness of critical infrastructure networks, both technical and human performance measures have become important. A paper proposes a model for evaluating critical network infrastructures using both human and technical performance measures, and illustrates use of the model in a case study.
Innovation in Information Systems Education-II: Enterprise IS Management: A Capstone Course for Undergraduate IS Majors
John Beachboard, David V Beard. Communications of the Association for Information Systems. Atlanta: 2005. Vol. 15; p. 1
As information technology becomes increasingly embedded in critical business processes, IS professionals continually seek to improve the security, reliability and performance of the systems for which they are responsible. Systems and network applications vendors are unveiling a wide array of new products designed to assist in this effort and the trade literature is devoting significant coverage to the IT operations processes required to achieve required IT service levels. Despite increasing industry attention to the importance of IS operations, the authors believe that such concerns are relatively unaddressed in the typical undergraduate business-oriented IS curriculum. This article describes a course currently offered at the authors' university that conceptualizes the enterprise management of IS as including both IS governance and IS management processes. The distinction allows for coverage of traditional content related to the strategic use of information technology while providing an increased focus on IT operational management issues. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Submitted by Stuart D. Galup on Fri, 04/06/2007 - 1:26pm.
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