AMCIS 2007 Panel on IT Service Management: IT Service Management in the IS Curriculum

Abstract

The fundamental function of information technology (IT), whether internal or external, is the costeffective provision of IT services that meet organizational needs and align with organizational strategy. With ever-increasing adoption of IT management "best practices," industry now leads the academic community by recognizing the need for IT professionals educated in the IT service management (ITSM) processes-processes directly associated with the delivery of high-quality, cost-effective IT services. This article presents a summary of panel member presentations and subsequent discussions at Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) 2007 concerning the need to, and means for, incorporating ITSM concepts into business-school MIS/IS/CIS curricula. Panel members from industry strongly advocated the importance of including ITSM principles and concepts within business-school IS curricula. Academic members of the panel also articulated this need and described initiatives at their and other schools where ITSM concepts have been or are planned for inclusion in business school curricula at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. ITSM research opportunities, faculty preparedness, and possible resistance from within the IS academic community were additionally addressed.

A Quantitative Analysis of Information Systems Management in the Educational Industry

“…In such situations, it is important to rely on a standard to properly manage IT services. ITIL (Information Technology Information Library) is a de-facto standard [23,24] for most companies [25] that have a clear dependency on IT departments to develop their businesses (process description is in Appendix A). Authors also highlight the relationship between the use of ITIL and the quality of IT services.…”

“…Some examples of these standards and practices are Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), ITIL, ISO20.000, Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), among others. These standards are typically combined [43], although ITIL offers the most extended framework [23,24,44]. The management of IT services, in the ITIL framework, is driven by processes which are based on best practices in the market, composed of five sets of processes [45]: Service strategy, Service design, Service transition, Service operation, and Continuous improvement.…”

“…The re-definitions of processes keep them aligned with the needs of companies. The implementation of ITIL provides a reduction of costs, a better service in terms of availability, an improved governance and satisfaction for users [23,47].…”

An IT Service Management Literature Review: Challenges, Benefits, Opportunities and Implementation Practices

“…However, the notion of service and service management in the IT area just started to appear in the 1980s when the IT systems and all the IT environment increased in complexity [19]. IT services can be defined as a group of "tasks" [26] provided by an IT system or an IT department [27], that is, IT service can be characterized as the application of specialized capacities on IT assets [28]. IT services have a big impact on IT organization budget, being estimated that the maintenance and operability of these services are between 80-90 percent of the total cost attributed to IT resources [4].…”

Exploring service issues within the IT organisation: Four mini-case studies

“…There is an increasing interest in the literature of IT Governance (Buckby, Best, & Stewart, 2009). The teaching of IT service management is growing in importance (Beachboard et al, 2007;Zhai et al, 2008). Furthermore, research is developing in the study of service process change in IT services (Cater-Steel & McBride, 2007;Hochstein, Tamm, & Brenner, 2005).…”