In the last two decades the IT service support worker has emerged to be a worker-type of considerable socio-economic importance. Such workers are symbolic of the trends towards the importance of information/knowledge and information technology within modern economic/political systems. Such systems, heavily influenced by governmental bodies and business organisations, have aggrandised the use of rationalising customer-centric management techniques. And yet such symbolic workers are largely hidden and unacknowledged as a specific type of worker in the business literature. This thesis represents an attempt to conceptualise the IT service support worker as a worker-type, inducing a conceptual model that identifies three aspects to the worker: information systems worker; knowledge worker and service worker and considers them from each of these perspectives. This qualitative research draws on a rich mix of observational and interview data collected across five UK organisations to produce a narrative that suggests that, for different IT service support workers, those different aspects tend to be variably emphasised within their team roles. The study additionally offers a theoretical conclusion that IT service support workers might reasonably be divided into different classes depending upon not only the design of their team role but also their individual career orientations and the nature of the knowledge they actually use in their work. Four such classes are identified as being of particular significance and these are evocatively named: Resigned Robots ; Constrained Careerists ; Establishment Experts and Aspiring Artisans . Whilst being outside of the scope of this study, it is suggested that this novel typology might also be useful for classifying other worker groupings. The study is intended to be useful for the enhancement of IT service management practice and makes several contributions in this regard. These include the need for managers to recognise the importance of experientially-acquired knowledge for efficiency in IT service support work and a suggestion that managers might tailor HRM practices for different classes of worker.

Šiuolaikiniame pasaulyje vykstant globalizacijai, informacinių sistemų panaudojimas apima vis daugiau, sparčiai, su naujomis technologijomis žengiančios įmonės verslo procesų. Didėjant įmonės verslo priklausomybei nuo naujų technologijų yra būtina optimaliai koordinuoti įmonėje vykstančius IT procesus. Yra nemažai tarptautiniu mastu pripažįstamų standartų, tačiau labai svarbu juos tinkamai pasirinkti bei taikyti. Šio darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti lyderiaujančius IT paslaugų kokybės valdymo standartus ITIL, CobiT bei ISO ir pasiūlyti optimalų sprendimą IT ūkio priežiūros problemai spręsti. Darbe nuosekliai aprašomi IT paslaugų valdymo metodologijos standartai, jų poreikiai ir galimybės. Apžvelgiama ITIL realizacija populiariausiuose programinės įrangos paketuose, pateikiama jų stipriųjų bei silpnųjų pusių analizė, rekomendacijos naujoms rinkoms. Pasiūlytos rekomendacijos lengvai gali būti pritaikomos pagal konkretaus verslo poreikius, tiek organizacijoms, kurios pačios prižiūri savo IT ūkį, tiek kompanijoms teikiančioms IT priežiūros paslaugas. / In the modern world Information Technologies are one of the most important parts of enterprise, even if IT is not key business. It‘s critical to support company‘s IT infrastucture in order to obtain as high effectiveness as it is possible. The goal of our Master thesis is to review leading IT quality management standarts and to propose IT support recommendations for companies. This work presents IT support stages and required software to establish best practice approaches for IT service management, based on ITIL. Proposed recommendations are not related to core business and organization‘s IT. They can be applied by organizations with support their IT themselves and by IT support outsourcing companies.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-23T14:33:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao de Gleison Baioco.pdf: 1821375 bytes, checksum: 1f3ea977985979f854fd23c9e03a7bd8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-08-21 / A tecnologia da informação (TI) vem se tornando essencial para as organizações. Nesse contexto, o gerenciamento de TI vem evoluindo para incluir gerenciamento de serviços e governança de TI, apontando para paradigmas de gerenciamento de TI orientado ao negócio. Dessa forma, o alinhamento entre a TI e o negócio tem sido considerado como um dos fatores preponderantes para a efetividade de tais paradigmas. Em adicional, são mencionadas as contribuições provenientes da automação das atividades de gerenciamento. Acompanhando essa evolução, o gerenciamento de configuração desempenha um papel fundamental, fornecendo informações precisas da TI a todos os envolvidos no gerenciamento. Todavia, em função desse estreito relacionamento com todas as entidades ligadas ao gerenciamento, a interoperabilidade entre esses componentes tem sido caracterizada como um dos principais desafios de pesquisa em gerenciamento de redes e serviços. Nesse sentido, o uso de ontologias, em especial ontologias de fundamentação, tem sido indicado como uma maneira pro issora de se obter interoperabilidade semântica no domínio de gerenciamento de configuração, uma vez que elas expressam o significado dos conceitos do domínio, bem como os relacionamentos existentes entre eles, de forma clara e explícita. Além disso, ontologias permitem que esse significado seja definido em um formato legível por máquinas, tornando o conhecimento compartilhado não apenas por agentes humanos, mas também por sistemas computacionais, possibilitando a automação de processos. Assim, esta dissertação apresenta uma proposta de modelagem conceitual do domínio de gerenciamento de configuração, no contexto do gerenciamento de serviços e governança de TI, baseada em ontologias de fundamentação. O propósito dessa ontologia é prover um modelo conceitual desse domínio, comprometido em maximizar a expressividade, a clareza e a veracidade dos conceitos pertencentes a ele. Ademais, esta dissertação apresenta uma proposta de modelo de implementação, derivado do modelo conceitual desenvolvido. O objetivo é realizar uma prova de conceito da ontologia e também demonstrar como essa ontologia pode apoiar as atividades de gerenciamento de maneira automatizada / Information technology (IT) is becoming essential for organizations. In this context, IT management has evolved to include service management and IT governance, towards business driven IT management paradigms. Thus, the alignment between IT and business has been regarded as one of the leading factors for the effectiveness of such paradigms. Furthermore, contributions arising from management activities automation are mentioned. Following this evolution, configuration management plays a key role in providing accurate IT information to all involved in management. However, due to this close relationship with all entities related to management, interoperability among these components has been characterized as one of the main research challenges in network and service management. In this sense, the use of ontologies, foundational ontologies in particular, has been indicated as a promising way to achieve semantic interoperability in the configuration management domain, since they express the meaning of domain concepts, as well as the existing relationships between them, in a clear and explicit way. Moreover, ontologies allow that this meaning be defined in a machine readable format, making the knowledge shared not only by human agents, but also by computer systems, enabling process automation. Thus, this dissertation proposes a conceptual model of configuration management domain in the context of service management and IT governance, based on foundational ontologies. The purpose of this ontology is to provide a conceptual model of this domain, committed to maximizing the expressiveness, clarity and truthfulness of concepts that belong thereto. Moreover, this dissertation proposes an implementation model, derived from the developed conceptual model. The goal is to perform an ontology proof of concept and also demonstrate how this ontology can support the management activities in an automated way

Aims and Objectives: Information Technology (IT) service management has gained importance in the recent years. A service is a means of delivering value to the customers by facilitating outcomes, which customers want to achieve without ownership of the specific costs and risks. As IT services’ efficient execution revolves around its implementation through software management, the need for understanding the relationship between IT service management and software management has become crucial. The aim of this thesis is to explore this relationship. Methodology: We designed this thesis study as an exploratory study. First, a systematic literature review was conducted to explore the role of software engineering in IT service management and the interconnection between them. Then, we performed a case study at Telenor Sweden AB by conducting interviews in order to further investigate the intersecting elements between ITIL v3 Framework, which is an international standard for IT service management and software engineering considering ISO/IEC 12207 standard on software processes. Results: The outcome of this thesis is a mapping between IT service management and software engineering considering ISO/IEC 12207 for software engineering processes and ITIL V3 Framework for IT service management. These mappings have been recommended to use by the case company to incorporate ‘in-house’ software models in line with ITIL V3 Framework implementation. Conclusion: Though ITIL V3 framework gives in depth guidelines for IT Service Management, it does not give sufficient details for managing applications that constitute IT Services. As ITIL V3 is a framework, it is flexible to accommodate the software engineering processes defined in ISO/IEC 12207 standard. Though we brought three-way relationship between ITIL V3, ISO/IEC 12207 and case company’s software process models, it is found out that replacing existing models with ISO/IEC 12207 shall be difficult as it would be two new standards for the employees. The in house software process models are already inspired from standards. In this thesis, we provide a mapping between ITIL V3 and inhouse models of the case company to support the implementation of ITIL V3 for managing software applications to realize IT Services. / The thesis gives mapping between ITIL V3 Framework and ISO/IEC 12207 Software Engineering processes to incorporate them in integrated Service Management and Software Management / +46762509249

More than ever, businesses heavily rely on IT service delivery to meet their current and frequently changing business requirements. Optimizing the quality of service delivery improves customer satisfaction and continues to be a critical driver for business growth. The routine maintenance procedure plays a key function in IT service management, which typically involves problem detection, determination and resolution for the service infrastructure. Many IT Service Providers adopt partial automation for incident diagnosis and resolution where the operation of the system administrators and automation operation are intertwined. Often the system administrators' roles are limited to helping triage tickets to the processing teams for problem resolving. The processing teams are responsible to perform a complex root cause analysis, providing the system statistics, event and ticket data. A large scale of system statistics, event and ticket data aggravate the burden of problem diagnosis on both the system administrators and the processing teams during routine maintenance procedures. Alleviating human efforts involved in IT service management dictates intelligent and efficient solutions to maximize the automation of routine maintenance procedures. Three research directions are identified and considered to be helpful for IT service management optimization: (1) Automatically determine problem categories according to the symptom description in a ticket; (2) Intelligently discover interesting temporal patterns from system events; (3) Instantly identify temporal dependencies among system performance statistics data. Provided with ticket, event, and system performance statistics data, the three directions can be effectively addressed with a data-driven solution. The quality of IT service delivery can be improved in an efficient and effective way. The dissertation addresses the research topics outlined above. Concretely, we design and develop data-driven solutions to help system administrators better manage the system and alleviate the human efforts involved in IT Service management, including (1) a knowledge guided hierarchical multi-label classification method for IT problem category determination based on both the symptom description in a ticket and the domain knowledge from the system administrators; (2) an efficient expectation maximization approach for temporal event pattern discovery based on a parametric model; (3) an online inference on time-varying temporal dependency discovery from large-scale time series data.

The project inspects and discusses improvements of the technical assistance of Change Management support within IT service provider. The primary objective of the procet is to analyse and implement a new software tool to display possible improvements. This project involves whole software development proces including requirements collection, systém analysis, design, implementation. In the first part, the IT service management, especially Change Management area and ITIL methodology is described. In the second part, the analysis of current state of the proces implementation and software tool is discussed and proposed opportunities for improvement. In the end, the results are summarized and possibilities of the future improvements are proposed.

Att leverera IT-relaterade tjänster är utmanande för många företag och verksamheter. För att underlätta för leverantörer av IT-tjänster har processtöd tagits fram som går under namnet IT Service Management där det ledande ramverket ITIL tillhandahåller riktlinjer för bland annat processer i form av incident- och problemhantering. Införandet av IT Service Management handlar till stora delar om resurskrävande aktiviteter som förändringar i arbetssätt och införande av processer. Detta gör att många små och medelstora företag upplever att det är kostsamt och svårt samtidigt som det behöver skapas förståelse för vilka värdeskapande effekter ramverket kan medföra, för att motivera den insats som krävs. För att tydliggöra effekterna av IT Service Management används prestationsmätning - processen att mäta effektivitet och verkningsgrad av ett antal åtgärder. Huvudsyftet med denna uppsats är att identifiera och beskriva användningen av prestationsmätning inom IT Service Management enligt små och medelstora företag. Bisyftet är att identifiera och beskriva utmaningar och risker som företrädare för små och medelstora företag uppfattar med prestationsmätning inom IT Service Management. Därtill ställs frågan om hur små och medelstora företag har arbetat för att minimera risker och hantera utmaningar som kommer med prestationsmätning inom IT Service Management.  Kvalitativa data har samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med fem respondenter där intervjusvar har bearbetats genom tematisk analys för att besvara studiens fyra undersökningsfrågor. Studiens slutsatser är att de mätbara organisatoriska fördelar som små och medelstora företag har identifierat med IT Service Management är uttalat arbetssätt, gemensamt språk, tekniskt verktyg, beprövade metoder samt processeffektivitet. Därutöver identifierades utmaningar som omfattar att identifiera adekvata prestationsmått, det administrativa arbetet samt att upprätthålla engagemang. Studiens slutsatser om risker omfattar arbetsmiljöns påverkan av synliggjorda resultat och vilseledande resultat av mätningar. Små och medelstora företag kan hantera utmaningar och minimera risker genom utbildning, dra nytta av tillgängliga resurser och genom stöd av företagsledningen.

Knowledge management is seen as a hot topic in order for organizations to become effective and utilize the knowledge residing within the organization. The most important factor in knowledge management is believed to be the knowledge transfer, which is the process of transferring knowledge between two parties. A context in which knowledge and knowledge transfer are especially important is within the best practice framework ‘ITIL’ and IT-service organizations. Therefore, the purpose with this study is to analyze how knowledge is transferred through information systems in an ITIL organization, and how the transfer process can be further understood by incorporating individual perspectives on knowledge. Besides that, our purpose is to identify factors influencing the knowledge transfer from both the organizations and the ITIL framework. The reason for this is that knowledge transfer through information systems in an ITIL context is rather underexplored, previous research regarding this is mainly focusing on putting knowledge in repositories and make it available, which is believed to create certain implications regarding the individual perspective in the creation and transfer of knowledge through information systems. These implications are something that has not been explored, which is a knowledge gap we intend to fill with this thesis. That is why we have constructed three research questions regarding how the organizations understand what valuable knowledge is, what factors that is influencing their knowledge transfer, and how these previously individual aspects can be further understood by applying the boundary object theory on knowledge transfer through information systems. From a multi case study with semi structured interviews we could collect a valuable collection of empirical data, that was collected from six respondents representing three organizations. By applying the interpretive and social constructivist research philosophy with an abductive methodological approach, previous research and the boundary object theory in combination with the theory of knowledge creation we could analyze our empirical data. Our study shows that the perspective on valuable knowledge is something with direct relation to ITIL, and highly connected to what its contribution is to the core business that the IT-service organization is helping. Valuable knowledge is also seen as stored knowledge. We can from our study also see that there are four predominant forces influencing the knowledge transfer process. We identified that the overall perspective on what knowledge is in the organization, how and what the organization values as knowledge, the ITIL framework and their knowledge management strategy directly influenced knowledge transfer. Our main finding in this study is that when organizations are transferring knowledge through information systems the individual perspective on both knowledge, knowledge creation and the knowledge transfer is one of the most important to keep in mind. The knowledge in the information systems is a way to communicate among individuals, and a way to translate one individual’s knowledge to another, hence is the individual creating the knowledge an important factor to acknowledge. We can see that aspects such as experiences, skills, insights, purposes, perspectives and contextual understandings highly influence the knowledge being created, hence the possibility to create rich knowledge at the receiver of knowledge. These aspects also influence whether the stored knowledge has any tacit elements, which seems to facilitate learning more for the receiving individual.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:19:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 176599.pdf: 876932 bytes, checksum: ef8000a8886de223bc1442221f883479 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-04-29T00:00:00Z / Internet Banking has an increasingly role for banks and its related strategies for reducing costs, expansion and retention of user base, new business, innovation, among others. This study seeks to assess to what extent the IT management processes applied to the Internet Banking service in a retail bank are aligned with its business strategy and are effective to meet users’ quality expectations. A qualitative approach was used, through a case study on a major Brazilian financial bank. Its IT infrastructure management processes and metrics have been studied, and interviews applied to managers and analysts in the IT area. Findings suggest that the use of Internet Banking service availability as the driver of strategic alignment between IT and business areas can result in improvements in users’ satisfaction, represented by the evolution of complaints related to the Internet Banking service. / O Internet Banking assume um papel cada vez mais importante para os bancos, estando relacionado com estratégias de redução de custos, ampliação e retenção da base de usuários, possibilidade de novos negócios, inovação, entre outras. Este estudo procura avaliar em que medida os processos de gestão de TI aplicados ao serviço de Internet Banking em um banco de varejo estão alinhados com sua estratégia de negócios e se são eficazes em atender a expectativa de qualidade de seus usuários. Neste trabalho foi utilizada uma abordagem qualitativa através do estudo de caso em uma grande instituição financeira nacional, a partir da análise de seus processos e indicadores de gestão de infra-estrutura de TI e de entrevistas semi-estruturadas aplicadas a gerentes e analistas da área de tecnologia. Os resultados sugerem que a utilização da variável disponibilidade de acesso do serviço de Internet Banking como métrica diretora do alinhamento estratégico entre as áreas de TI e as áreas de negócio pode acarretar melhorias na satisfação dos usuários, representadas pela evolução do índice mensal de reclamações do serviço.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-23T14:33:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andre Costa - Dissertacao - parte 1.pdf: 1053237 bytes, checksum: 8e90f2576db5227bb4eb33f34158733a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-08-15 / This work presents a domain conceptual model of ITIL Service Level Management by using foundational ontologies, and also presents the application of the definied concepts in this model in the service provider module of Infraware context-aware service platform. The study of the ITIL service management process and conceptual modeling of this domain is an attempt to give the first steps in what refers to the formalization of this domain concepts and its use in context-aware service platforms, in particular. A case study is presented to validate the model and to verify its applicability in the generation of management information and of control to the service provider module of the platform and its customers / Este trabalho apresenta um modelo conceitual do domínio do processo de Gerenciamento de Nível de Serviço da biblioteca ITIL utilizando ontologias de fundamentação, e a aplicação dos conceitos definidos neste modelo no módulo provedor de serviço da plataforma de serviços sensíveis ao contexto Infraware. O estudo do processo de gerenciamento de serviços ITIL e a modelagem conceitual deste domínio visam dar os primeiros passos no que se refere à formalização dos conceitos deste domínio e a sua utilização em plataformas de serviços sensíveis ao contexto, em particular. Um estudo de caso é desenvolvido como forma de validar o modelo e de comprovar sua aplicabilidade na geração de informações de gerenciamento e de controle para o módulo provedor de serviço da plataforma e para seus clientes