The main objective of this diploma thesis is to identify the problems (restrictions, impasses) which are connected with the practical implementation described in the ITIL publication - the processes of ITSM. For achieving these objectives it was necessary to study extensive library of methodologies and standards that are being used in the area of IT service management (i.e. ITIL, CobiT, and ISO 20000). The conclusion is based on the results of consultations with the practicing specialists. The form of these consultations was a questionnaire elaborated in advance. The whole thesis can be separated into two logical units: the theoretical one and the practical one. The structure of theoretical part and the content of individual chapters are designed so that the reader can progressively acquire knowledge about the position of ITSM/ITIL in the area of methodologies and legislative standards intended for operating organization as a whole. In the other part of this thesis the relationship between, actually the most prestigious, two approaches to IT service management: ITSM and IT Governance is described. The chapter presenting other similar methodologies for IT service management follows in logical sequences. The introduction of practical part is dedicated to the basic characteristics of various ways of ITSM implementation (from the position of system integrator, in the form of internal project and in the public sector). The conclusion is divided into three units of the same titles as the main headstones of ITSM, these headstones are: the people, the tools and the processes. For every single unit I have elaborated the summary of the restrictions and the impasses that can appear during practical implementation of ITSM. The main contribution of this diploma thesis is just the last-mentioned, the compilation of summary of impasses related do the practical implementation of IT Service Management.

Basierend auf den erfolgreichen Einsätzen von Lean Management in der Automobilbranche und darauffolgend in weiteren Wirtschaftszweigen übernahmen auch immer mehr große IT-Dienstleister diese Prinzipien und Konzepte. Kaum ausgeprägt ist jedoch bisher der Einsatz von Lean Management in Unternehmen, die primär IT-Dienstleistungen für externe klein- und mittelständische Kunden anbieten. Die dazu notwendigen Produkte müssen individuell auf die Kundenanforderungen zugeschnitten sein und sind deshalb sehr heterogen und kostenintensiv. Werden die Potentiale in den Bereichen Personaleinsatz, Durchlaufzeiten und Qualität mittels der Anwendung von LM-Prinzipien ausgeschöpft, sind große Effizienzsteigerungen realisierbar. Deshalb ist es wert, gerade auch für das klein- und mittelständische Dienstleistungssegment zu überlegen, wie die Lean-Management-Prinzipien trotz dieser komplexen Problemstellung umgesetzt werden können. Zu diesem Zweck wird in der Arbeit auf Basis der leanen Grundüberlegung Vermeidung von Verschwendung ein Modell entwickelt, das das schlanke Managementkonzept mit dem Best-Practise-Framework ITIL verknüpft. Die Umsetzung dieses Modells lässt Effizienzsteigerungen, Verbesserungen in der Prozessqualität sowie die Erhöhung der Kunden- und Mitarbeiterzufriedenheit erwarten. / Based on the successful Lean Management applications in the automotive industry and, subsequently, in other sectors of the economy, a growing number of large IT service providers has adopted these principles and concepts. However, the use of Lean Management is hardly distinctive among companies that offer primarily IT services for external small and medium-sized customers. The products necessary for this must be individually tailored to customer requirements and are, therefore, heterogeneous and costly. If potential is fully utilized by applying Lean Management principles in the areas of human resource placement, lead times and quality, major gains in efficiency can be achieved. It is, therefore, worth considering how Lean Management principles can be implemented, in spite of the complex problem statement, even for the small and medium-sized service segment. Towards that end, within this paper a model is developed on the basis of the \"lean\" rationale of Waste Avoidance, which links the Lean Management concept with the Best Practice Framework of ITIL. The implementation of this model makes way for gains in efficiency, improvements in process quality, as well as increased satisfaction among customers and employees.

Research in Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) explores howbusinesses of all sizes and digital maturity can strive to offer high-quality IT servicesto meet customers' needs in a changing world. By leveraging ITSM best practices andthe Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, organizationscan ensure valuable service operations and continuous service quality improvement.Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) particularly require tailored processesand support to implement and adapt these practices to maintain competitiveness anddrive their development forward.This qualitative study examines a Swedish medium-sized IT service provider'sperspective on success factors for ITIL implementation and its use of operationalprocesses to contribute to ongoing research in ITSM and the studied business'sdevelopment. The findings highlight the business as a rapidly growing SME withperspectives on critical success factors differing somewhat from research and havinglow process maturity according to the ITIL Process Maturity Model (PMF). Finally,suggestions are made on how businesses like this and their process maturity can bestrengthened through clarifying roles, defining operational process metrics,terminology and documentation, as well as establishing a problem managementprocess. This supports ITSM research by viewing critical success factors in a Swedishcontext and by proposing how best practices can be used to enhance serviceoperations in an SME. / Forskning inom Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) utforskar hurverksamheter, med olika storlek och digital mognad, kan sträva efter att erbjudahögkvalitativ IT-service för att möta kundernas behov i en föränderlig värld. Genomanvändningen av bästa praxis för ITSM och ramverket Information TechnologyInfrastructure Library (ITIL), kan organisationer säkerställa värdefull drift av tjänsteroch kontinuerlig förbättring av tjänstekvaliteten. Små till Medelstora Verksamheter(SME) behöver särskilt anpassade processer och stöd för att implementera ochanpassa dessa för att bibehålla sin konkurrenskraft och driva sin utveckling framåt.Denna kvalitativa studie undersöker en svensk medelstor IT-serviceleverantörs synpå framgångsfaktorer för ITIL-implementation och dess användning avdriftsprocesser för att bidra till fortsatt forskning inom ITSM och den studeradeverksamhetens utveckling. Resultatet visar på hur verksamheten är en snabbt växandeSME med syn på kritiska framgångsfaktorer som avviker till viss del från forskningenoch har låg processmognad enligt ITIL:s Process Maturity Framework (PMF).Slutligen föreslås hur verksamheter som denna och dess processmognad kan stärkasav förtydligande av roller, definition av driftsprocessers mätvärden, terminologi ochdokumentation samt etablerande av en problemhanteringsprocess. Detta stödjerforskning inom ITSM genom att synliggöra kritiska framgångsfaktorer i en svenskkontext samt genom framtagande av förslag på hur best practice kan användas för attutveckla tjänstedriften i en SME.

國內的公司面對激烈的全球化競爭，需積極提升競爭力、創造競爭優勢，IT除是公司營運中不可或缺的一部份，亦是組織提升競爭力的利器之一，然而在有限的時間與成本下，如何連結IT與企業目標，有效率的管理IT資源以提供服務給其他部門，進而凸顯出IT對組織的價值，一直是公司亟欲解決的問題，因此紛紛興起對於導入IT服務管理的想法，藉由實作ITIL後可以解決棘手的問題，但是公司在導入ITIL前並未評估公司組織目前的IT現況，瞭解其對於ITIL的準備程度，就決定要導入ITIL，其在導入的過程中可能會遇到很多困難，因而使得導入ITIL後的效益就不容易被呈現出來。 本研究以驗證組織是否符合IT服務管理要求的國際標準ISO 20000之規範內容為基礎，發展出公司導入IT服務管理前之準備度量表，評估公司對導入IT服務管理前之準備度。藉由準備度量表的評估結果瞭解公司目前IT的現況，以增進公司掌握是否申請驗證ISO 20000之決策資訊，並可藉由評估結果瞭解公司內IT、制度與流程的改善項目。 透過本研究所發展的評估量表及評估結果，與其他發展較早、企業較為熟悉的評鑑標準，如CMMI、企業電子化評量及國家品質獎等之評鑑內容進行對應與比較，讓企業瞭解ISO 20000規範內容與國家品質獎、CMMI、企業電子化評量等評鑑內容上的異同，進一步使公司瞭解其對IT服務管理之準備度。 本研究建議公司組織要導入IT服務管理前，首要評估本身的準備度，以瞭解其對於ISO 20000之符合程度，透過現況之評估、分析未來公司組織在導入IT服務管理過程中應改善的方向，以期建立起完整的IT服務管理體系，並透過PDCA管理循環的概念，讓企業IT服務品質可以持續循環改進，提升IT服務管理之層次，避免因為盲目的追隨潮流而導入ITIL，導致無法看到導入ITIL後的成效。 / Taiwan’s companies are facing fierce global competition. They must enhance competitiveness actively and create competitive advantage. “IT” is not only an integral part of companies’ operation, but can enhance the competitiveness of the organization. However in the limited time and costs, how to align IT and business objectives is a critical question. Due to this situation, therefore, these companies raise the idea of implementing IT service management. By implementing ITIL, they hope it could solve IT problems and IT department can manage IT resource efficiently to deliver IT service to other departments. Furthermore, they can prove their value to the whole organization. But before implementing ITIL, many companies haven’t assessed their own IT status and figured out their readiness of ITIL. If so, during implementing ITIL they would face many obstacles, and would finally not show the benefit of implementing ITIL. Based on the global IT service management standard “ISO 20000”, this research develops a readiness scale that could measure companies’ readiness of implementing IT service management. According to the readiness scale and its result, companies could know their IT status well and acquire the decision information that how to implement ITIL and apply for ISO 20000 certification or not. The study also compared the readiness scale and its result with other noted standards like CMMI, e-Business Assessment Scheme for Enterprise (e-BASE) and National Quality Award. Accordingly, companies could understand the similarities and dissimilarities between ISO 20000 and above famed standards. So that they could understand their IT service management readiness further. Finally the study recommended that before these companies implement IT service management, the first thing they should do is to assess their own readiness. By assessing and analyzing the IT status, so that they could know the compliance of ISO 20000, and find out their own improved direction of implementing IT service management. Companies should establish the whole IT service management system and the PDCA Management Cycle hence the quality of IT service could be improved continually.

IT Service Management (ITSM) is becoming a more relevant topic and the view of services is growing, therefore it is natural that new difficulties arise. When it comes to the manufacturing industry, it has not been seen as a difficult process to measure productivity. That is because it only refers to the ratio between output and input. However, when it comes to measuring the productivity of a service, many different factors have to be included. This is something several scientists agree to be a more difficult process. This difficulty is causing a lot of problems for businesses whose clients want to know if the service they are paying for is productive or not.   This study aimed at developing a simple prototype that makes it possible to measure the productivity of IT services. Based on previous research and the experience of another company from when they were measuring service productivity, a number of overall goals were set for the prototype. The objectives intended to counteract the problems identified in the previous research and thus the previous research served as a good starting point for the development of the prototype.   This study used design research to develop an innovative artifact, which got evalutated by experienced practitioners during two occasions. The purpose was to identify additional design principles that may be necessary in the development of this type of tool. The development and evaluation were conducted in two iterations. In the first iteration, there was a more informal discussion with an experienced ITSM practitioner about the artifact’s design, allowing for further development of the artifact. The evaluation conducted in the second iteration was more formal and was carried out using a focus group consisting of a number of practitioners with varied knowledge and experience relevant to the area. The obtained results were then compared to theory and previous research to contribute to the conclusions of the study.   The study resulted in two new design principles deemed necessary for this type of measurement tools. The informants and previous researchers’ thoughts about what they considered as important factors were the basis of the design principles. After the implementation of the prototype, there were problems that remained unsolved which were possible to present as future research opportunities. This study does not claim that its results make these kinds of tools complete. There needs to be more research on the subject to optimize the tool further and more design principles may be necessary. This study, on the other hand, may be the basis for future research or for practitioners who choose to implement or develop a similar tool.

IT service management is becoming more and more important in the current business environment. Especially the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a widely adopted and accepted IT service management framework (Wagner 2006). Organizations that adopt one of the IT service management frameworks expect to achieve a large range of benefits through the use of the frameworks. The major benefits that are expected to be realised include reduced costs, IT services that are tailored to the business needs, a higher quality of IT services, and improved customer satisfaction (OGC 2007a). Despite the growing importance and acceptance of IT service management and ITIL, there is not much literature that is concerned with the benefits that can be realised when one of the relevant IT service management frameworks is in place. Only a few studies were published in conference proceedings (e.g. Hochstein et al. 2005, Potgieter et al. 2005, Cater-Steel et al. 2006). Even though these studies were able to confirm some of the claims made by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the publisher of the ITIL series, there are still a lot of claims that are not evaluated to date. This thesis is taking a Monte-Carlo method based simulation approach to identify some of the benefits of the ITIL for customer service. To achieve this, an initial research model was developed that represents the four most likely benefits for customer service of the use of ITIL and their relationship with customer service and the generation of business value. Subsequently the different path ways for the relationships were explored and models for each of the possible paths were designed. These models include a mediated model, an unmediated model and a partially mediated model. After defining the estimates and constraints for the simulation, the simulation was executed using a MS Excel spreadsheet. The simulation results presented a large amount of data for each of the models and their relationships. The models produced normal distributions and showed stability for changed input and throughput parameters. The analysis of the findings showed that the changes in estimates for each of the models and the associated results of the simulation followed a linear pattern. The linearity of the models combined with the normal distribution of the results offers a lot of opportunities for the use of the developed models. A further enhancement through a test with real-life data could provide the basis for a tool to quantitatively predict the impact of an ITIL implementation on customer service and the creation of value for the business. In addition the four most likely contributors to improved customer service based on the use of ITIL have been identified from a literature review. The identified contribution towards improved customer service of these four beneficiary factors is supported by the results of the simulation. Therefore the results of this thesis provide the research community with a model that could provide the basis for further exploration of the beneficiary effects of ITIL on customer service.

During the last decades the importance of IT has increased for businesses all over the world. It has transferred from only being used in administrative purposes to become more integrated to the core business. Due to the financial crisis in 2009 and increasing globalization, IT is facing the challenge of lower costs and increased efficiency. This requires IT-departments to embrace new strategies in order to fulfill these new tougher demands. Lean is a business development concept that aims to lower costs through more effective processes by removing all activities that does not create any value from the end customer’s perspective. Lean originates from Toyota’s Production System, TPS but is today used by healthcare providers, banks and IT-departments. This master thesis aims to develop a tool that can assess the opportunities for an IT-department to increase its efficiency through the use of Lean. This tool has been developed in cooperation with Niklas Larsson and is to be used by management and IT consulting company Connecta AB. To ensure that the tool is useful for the company four goals have been defined. They are that the tool should be reliable, should not require large amounts of resources, should be user friendly and identify areas that can be improvement through the implementation of Lean. The Lean IT Assessment Tool has been developed through interviews with consultants at Connecta, studies of literature and articles about Lean and Lean IT. The tool consists of three parts. The first part assesses the maturity of the IT-department from a Lean perspective. The second part is a questionnaire that aims to identify the employees’ attitude toward their work environment. The third is a value stream map, VSM, which aims to identify problems and bottlenecks in a specific IT-process. To ensure that the goals were met the tool was tested at a representative IT-department. The conclusions were that they were all reached and the continuation of the work is now left to Connecta AB.

Information technology usage has become compulsory for all organizations whether government or private organizations to achieve visibility, compete rivals and execute their missions better. To get desired result from usage of information technology, IT of organization has to be managed well. Up till now, various frameworks are developed to manage it well. Best examples for this kind of frameworks are COBIT and ITIL, containing all processes which can be handled in IT management and becoming widespread through the world. COBIT and ITIL are complementary frameworks rather than competitors. Due to this reason, organizations must implement both of them instead of choosing one of them. In addition to these, ISO/IEC 27001:2005 which focuses on information security management process is a quite famous IT standard in terms of security. This thesis provides organizations to meet requirements of these frameworks/standards which are process based frameworks and standards complementary to each other, with a unique implementation by taking unification of processes in a more simple and understandable way. Consequently, it provides reduction in the duplicate work and prevents inconsistencies that may occur. In addition, including CMMI level two requirements motivate the organization to implement higher maturity level of CMMI. Moreover, this study provides organizations to implement ISO 27001 management structure which establish a foundation for extension to technical structure of it. Besides these, this study provides an alignment of frameworks model and COBIT and ITIL which helps organization to trace ITIL and COBIT simultaneously. Lastly by providing a web based application, there exists foundation for knowledge bank of IT processes in Turkish and profile pages for each organization to manage, trace and reach their own IT processes in a digital environment.

<p>This thesis focuses on how companies in Sweden should manage the processes of offshore outsourcing IT services to low-cost locations, but also how they should manage the planning and accomplishment to achieve their goals and the expected result in a good way. The thesis states that companies in Sweden need to put a lot of effort into planning and research considering potential location and vendor. Different aspects and phases of the offshoring processes will be stated, discussed and analyzed concerning a fictive</p><p>company called AbcIT. A visualization of internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats is presented by a SWOT analysis regarding offshore outsourcing of IT-services to India.</p> / <p>Denna uppsats fokuserar på hur företag i Sverige skall gå tillväga när de överväger offshore outsourcing av IT-tjänster till lågkostnadsländer, hur de ska genomföra planeringsarbete och genomförande för att på bästa sätt uppnå både mål och resultat. I uppsatsen konstateras att företag i Sverige behöver lägga stor vikt vid planering och förundersökning av framtida område och affärspartner. Olika faktorer och delar av offshoringprocessen tas upp, diskuteras och analyseras med hjälp av det fiktiva företaget AbcIT. En SWOT-analys visualiserar interna styrkor och svagheter samt externa möjligheter och hot vid offshore outsourcing av IT-tjänster till Indien.</p>

The new age, the "Information Age" (Davenport and Prusak 1997) has increased society's and businesses' reliance on Information Technology (IT). Hence, there is an increasing focus on the management of IT, not only from a technological perspective but also from a business perspective. This research, sponsored by REALTECH and the Australian Research Council, applies one of the modern management approaches, business process management (Hammer 1990), to the domain IT service provision, by designing a business process reference model for IT Service Provision. A reference model is an abstracted depiction of reality that serves as a standardised or suggestive conceptual basis for the design of enterprise specific models, usually within a like domain. They are one method of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise modelling and can also be used to standardise communication or capture knowledge. There is a general lack of theory regarding the classification, design and quality of reference models. The first part of this thesis attempts to fill these gaps, by presenting a reference model classification scheme, outlining 7 philosophies for the design of reference models and detailing 2 case studies on the user-perceived quality of business process reference models. Reference models and the Business Process Management Lifecycle (Rosemann 2000) are integrated to show how reference models can be applied to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business process improvement projects. This reference model theory was then applied to produce a model for domain of IT Service Provision. Investment in IT has increased to become the largest single element of capital expenditure (Thorp 1998). Gartner predicted that organisations will spend over 10% of revenue on IT by 2005 (Haines 2000). A major input for this model is the ITIL best practice documents (CCTA 2000). The reference model focuses on Incident Management and used focus groups with participants from several large IT service providers to validate the models. The designed reference model is then tested in two case studies to determine its accuracy and usefulness. The thesis finishes with a discussion of the designed model, the effectiveness of the procedural model and provides suggestions for the design of other reference models. The final chapter provides a summary and an outlook for further research into the area.