Abstract
Through Continual Service Improvement (CSI), IT service providers aim at identifying, documenting, evaluating and prioritising improvement areas in services and service processes. CSI plays a crucial role in managing service and process quality as well as transforming improvement suggestions and ideas into concrete actions and product features. Unfortunately, many companies lack the systematic CSI approach and tools. This may lead into lost business opportunities, long processing times in implementing customers’ change requests and finally losing key customers. Additionally, digital transformation creates a need for more agile and flexible CSI. Therefore, CSI is an actual and interesting research target from service quality perspective. In this paper, CSI practices of a Finnish IT service provider company are studied. The research problem is: How IT service provider organizations perform Continual Service Improvement methods as part of daily service operation management? The main contribution of this paper is to present findings from a case study with a ISO/IEC 20000 compliant service organization. We focus on exploring how the quality of CSI targets is monitored, how CSI is organized and deployed into practice and how service-related improvements are managed.
Supported by Digiteknologian TKI-ympäristö project A74338 (ERDF, Regional Council of Pohjois-Savo).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
van Aartsengel, A., Selahattin, K.: A Guide to Continuous Improvement Transformation - Concepts, Processes, Implementation. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35904-0
Abdulmouti, H.: The role of Kaizen (continuous improvement) in improving companies’ performance: a case study. In: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM), pp. 1–6, March 2015
Allen, S.: Development of a work monitoring, evaluation and improvement process. Eng. Manag. J. 10(3), 135–141 (2000)
Barafort, B., et al.: ITSM Process Assessment Supporting ITIL. Van Haren Publishing, Zaltbommel (2009)
Cabinet Office: ITIL Continual Service Improvement. The Stationary Office, UK (2011)
Cabinet Office: ITIL Service Design. The Stationary Office, UK (2011)
COBIT 4.0: Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology. ISACA (2005)
Eisenhardt, K.: Building theories from case study research. Acad. Manag. Rev. 14, 532–550 (1989)
Gacenga, F., Cater-Steel, A.: Performance measurement of it service management: a case study of an Australian university (research in progress). In: PACIS 2011–15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Quality Research in Pacific, AIS Electronic Library (2011)
Gentile, C., Spiller, N., Noci, G.: How to sustain the customer experience: an overview of experience components that co-create value with the customer. Eur. Manag. J. 25(5), 395–410 (2007)
Gervalla, M., Preniqi, N., Kopacek, P.: IT infrastructure library (ITIL) framework approach to IT governance. IFAC-PapersOnLine 51(30), 181–185 (2018)
Heikkinen, S., Jäntti, M.: Establishing a continual service improvement model: a case study. In: Winkler, D., O’Connor, R.V., Messnarz, R. (eds.) EuroSPI 2012. CCIS, vol. 301, pp. 61–72. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31199-4_6
Iden, J., Eikebrokk, T.: Implementing it service management: a systematic literature review. Int. J. Inf. Manag. 33, 512–523 (2013)
ISO: ISO 9000:2005 Quality management systems - Requirements. ISO Copyright Office (2005)
ISO/IEC 20000:1: Part 1: Service management system requirements. ISO/IEC JTC 1 Secretariat (2011)
ISO/IEC TS 15504–8:2012: Information technology - Process assessment -Part 8: An exemplar process assessment model for IT service management. ISO/IEC TC JTC1/SC7 Secretariat (2012)
Jäntti, M.: Lessons learnt from the improvement of customer support processes: a case study on incident management. In: Bomarius, F., Oivo, M., Jaring, P., Abrahamsson, P. (eds.) PROFES 2009. LNBIP, vol. 32, pp. 317–331. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02152-7_24
Jäntti, M., Hotti, V.: Defining the relationships between it service management and it service governance. Inf. Technol. Manag. 17(2), 141–150 (2016)
Jokela, K., Jäntti, M.: Challenges and problems in product portfolio release and deployment management. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Service Systems and Service Management (ICSSSM12). IEEE, Shanghai (2012)
Kajko-Mattsson, M.: Corrective maintenance maturity model: problem management. In: ICSM 2002: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2002), p. 486. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2002)
Lahtela, A., Jäntti, M., Kaukola, J.: Implementing an ITIL-based IT service management measurement system. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Digital Society, pp. 249–254. IEEE Computer Society, St. Maarten, February 2010
Lewis, M., Brown, A.: How different is professional service operations management? J. Oper. Manag. 30(1), 1–11 (2012)
Lima, A., deSousa, J., Oliveira, J., Sauve, J., Moura, A.: Towards business-driven continual service improvement. In: 2010 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium Workshops, pp. 95–98. IEEE, NJ (2010)
McNaughton, B., Ray, P., Lewis, L.: Designing an evaluation framework for IT service management. Inf. Manag. 47, 219–225 (2010)
OGC: ITIL Planning to Implement. The Stationary Office, UK (2002)
Pollard, C., Cater-Steel, A.: Justifications, strategies, and critical success factors in successful ITIL implementations in U.S. and Australian companies: an exploratory study. Inf. Syst. Manag. 26(2), 164–175 (2009)
Runeson, P., Höst, M.: Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empir. Softw. Eng. 14, 131–164 (2009)
Shrestha, A., Cater-Steel, A., Tan, W., Toleman, M.: A model to select processes for IT service management improvement. In: ACIS 2012 : Proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Conference on Information Systems, pp. 1–10. ACIS (2012)
Shrestha, A., Cater-Steel, A., Toleman, M.: Virtualising process assessments to facilitate continual service improvement in IT service management. In: ACIS 2015 Proceedings - 26th Australasian Conference on Information Systems. ACIS (2015)
Yin, R.: Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Sage Publishing, Beverly Hills (1994)
Zeithaml, V., Parasuraman, A., Berry, L.: Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations. The Free Press, Nariman Point (1990)
Zhang, L.J., Zhang, J., Cai, H.: Services Computing. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-38284-3. Tsinghua University Press, Beijing
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Heikkinen, S., Jäntti, M. (2019). Studying Continual Service Improvement and Monitoring the Quality of ITSM. In: Piattini, M., Rupino da Cunha, P., García Rodríguez de Guzmán, I., Pérez-Castillo, R. (eds) Quality of Information and Communications Technology. QUATIC 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1010. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29238-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29238-6_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29237-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29238-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)