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

Abstract

Abstract. 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 IT Service Desk and Service Management Processes in Finnish Tax Administration: A Case Study on Service Engineering

“…Moreover, Iden and Eikebrokk [24] have conducted a study on conceptualization and measurements of ITIL implementation project. There are also studies that are directly related to service management processes, such as improvement of incident management processes based on ITIL practices [25], creating a mature problem management process [26], service testing [27], service level management [28] and change and configuration management [29]. Surprizingly few of ITSM studies have provided details how ITIL-based process implementation has been done in government agencies or presented feedback on ITSM trainings.…”

Defining the relationships between IT service management and IT service governance

“…Studies on service design have dealt especially with service continuity management [7] and availability management [8]. IT service operation studies have focused on predicting incident management lifecycle [9], improving incident management processes [10], establishing knowledge base systems for problem management [11] and exploring problem management from the viewpoint of corrective maintenance [12].…”

Improvement of IT service processes: a study of critical success factors

“…However, there are organizations that suffer difficulties during the implementation of projects related to the improvement of IT service processes, and consequently they do not succeed (Jäntti, 2010;Pollard and CaterSteel, 2009;Sharifi et al 2008).…”