Barriers to Implementing ITIL-A Multi-Case Study on the Service-based Industry

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a multi-case study on three service-based companies. It intends to highlight the difficulties that the customer service centers of these companies had in their attempt to implement IT infrastructure library to improve organizational efficiency. The study was designed to collect data related to the barriers to investment in information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) across service and process. The main research method involved interviews in the organizational settings. The framework of balanced scorecard (BSC) was used to collect the data. Results of the multi-case study showed that the ITIL downsides were: 1) incongruence between quality improvement and customer's expectation, 2) inefficiency in meeting customer's needs, 3) conflicts between standardized processes and unanticipated requests, 5) lack of autonomy and calcified learning scope, and 6) people lacking integrative capability.

Proactive Management of IT Operations to Improve IT Services

“…This situation may be due to the fact that ITIL provides limited advice on proactive methods. Our findings support previous research by Shang and Shu-Fang (2010) who found that factors such as lack of resources and resistance to change stymy process change initiatives.…”

“…The challenges reported are consistent with those found in prior studies on ITIL implementation: difficulties in measuring and reporting ITSM outcomes (Gacenga, CaterSteel, & Toleman, 2010); the importance of process integration (Beath & Straub, 1989;Shang & Shu-Fang, 2010); proactive orientation to incident management (Järveläinen, 2013); classification of incidents and service requests as well as identification of problems (Jantti, Rout, Wen, Heikkimen, & Cater-Steel, 2013). Our findings also confirm the view of Niessink and van Vliet (2000) that IT support organizations experience issues at the interface between incident management and problem management.…”

“…A range of factors have been identified that led to failure in ITIL adoption: customer dissatisfaction, additional costs for education and management, time lag in achieving benefits, conflict between urgent needs and costs, implementation difficulties, employee resistance, and lack of integration ability (Shang & Shu-Fang, 2010). Removing these bottlenecks can enhance the IT service provider's capability to provide high quality service support to customers.…”

IT controls in the public cloud: Success factors for allocation of roles and responsibilities

“…The framework of ITIL contains seven service life cycle stages, including service support, service delivery, planning to implement service management, security management, ITC infrastructure management, application management and the business perspective (Shang & Lin, 2010). For the successful execution of each of the ITSM lifecycle stages, roles and responsibilities of various activities are defined by using a RACI ( Figure 2.3), RACI-VS (Verifies & Signs-off) or RASCI (Supportive) chart (Rudd & Loyd, 2007).…”

“…Despite ITIL providing these guidelines for the allocation of roles and responsibilities to IT controls, organisations find it difficult to implement the ITIL framework (Ying, Lijun, & Wei, 2009) because it is not organisation-specific (McNaughton, Ray, & Lewis, 2010;Shang & Lin, 2010) and it only provides guidelines, thereby leaving implementation issues to the practitioners themselves (Cox, 2013;Pereira & Silva, 2010;Ying et al, 2009). Provided criteria are very generic and not specific to a cloud environment.…”