The Importance Of ISO/IEC 20000 And IT Service Management System For Enhanced Service Quality: A Case Study Of ExcelIT

What is ISO/IEC 20000 standard and its significance?

Question:

Discuss about the Integrating IT Service Management Requirements.

The international Information Technology standard, which allows a company to present a proof of their excellent practices in the industry, is the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. This standard presents the best industry service benchmarks so that the companies to provide evidence of their own services in comparison to the set benchmarks. This enables a company to reach a desired height of quality in delivering improved quality of IT services. It has now become a competitive differentiation between IT service provider companies and has helped in raising the quality of services provided in the IT organizations (Cortina et al. 2016). In this particular report, a case study of a webinar explains the functionality and importance of ISO/IEC 20000 for the IT industry. Further, the report would include discussions about Service Management Systems and in which way can it be incorporated into ITSM to enhance the services of ExcelIT. The report would next include a brief summary of the engagement highlighted by the webinar spokesperson based on the iterative engagement approach of ISO/IEC 20000 certification journey and discuss major engagement challenges that have been encountered during the case study described in the webinar. The last part of the report would hold three key benefits of ISO/IEC 20000 certification.

IT Service Management or more commonly known as ITSM are the policy driven activities of an organization as a whole. The system also involves organization-structured processes and their supporting procedures that involve providing the best quality of IT services to the customers (Laudon and Laudon 2016). The Service Management thus means for the better implementation of the IT services to meet the needs of a customer and to abide by the service that they have promised to deliver to their customers. This degree of implementation of a IT Service Management in an organization is measured by service providers through an mixture of people consisting of process an information technology. If the implementation is justified in the basis of discipline, ITSM has a much more similarity with general management approaches (Cots and Casadesús 2015). These approaches are Quality Management, Software Engineering and Information Security Management. The presence of Service Management system in an organization ensures the excellence of the company’s service provided to the customers.

The ITSM system is being implemented by many organizations worldwide to support the service providing systems of the business. Since, it represents the way an organization agrees to manage its services therefore there are many set standards that evaluate the service management system of the organizations. ExcelIT or Excel Communications Pty Limited was first found in the year 1991 (Lobban et al. 2017). Since then it has become one of the main suppliers of the telecommunication products for Samsung providing services all over the areas of Newcastle, Port Stephens, Central Cost, Hunter region of New South Wales and Australia wide. The regions the company has been providing services to, were becoming obsolete with the passing days. However, ExcelIT has been successful in keeping pace with the changing times (Franco 2015). It provides services for supply, maintenance and installation of Samsung Communications Solution to the clients in need of value added services, expertise and ideas. However, in recent times it was found that the customers were not essentially satisfied with the services provided by the ExcelIT organization. Therefore, it was very necessary to implement ITSM into the organizational structure because the organization wanted to adapt the perspective mythology to adapt to the key aspects (Galvan-Cruz et al. 2017). This would allow the organization to involve the primary performance indicators. ITSM would provide the integration of the flow of information across all the areas or on all the premises in the organization. It would thus enhance the integration of the technological services provided in the organization. ITSM implementation in ExcelIT would pull together the information via disparate systems for delivering both the consolidation of events and an effective visualization into a distinct view. It also allows the organization to resolve problems much faster than the organization could actually do before the implementation of the system. The ITSM can identify problems much faster and propose an effective way to resolve the same to aid to the service system of ExcelIT. It makes a counteractive action. It provides with workflow assessment to streamline the count of a company asset, change management and problem management. The ITSM system also implements event analysis and root-cause analysis helps to separate problems and get them to the proper group for resolution in no time.

What is IT Service Management System and its importance?

As per the case study, there have been a major criteria highlighted by Mr. Basu on the iterative engagement approach of ISO/IEC 20000 certification journey. Generally, there are two models of engagement approach of ISO/IEC 20000 certification. They are the Waterfall engagement model and the Iterative engagement approach (Herrera 2017). In the Waterfall method, the system of certifying a company with ISO/IEC 20000 certification follows a very general rule. This includes the planning, auditing and execution of the certification process by handing over the certificates. This is a manual and irreversible approach into auditing function of ISO/IES 20000 certification (YouTube, 2018). On the other hand, iterative approach has an iterated journey with the tasks to perform being broken down to several pieces of task and then complete each task depending on those segregated models. In case of the case study, Mr. Basu had clearly stated that the iterative model is based on weekly work breakdown by several interconnected steps flowing in a series including planning, gap analysis, team specific customisation, roles distribution, planning, go-live, monitoring, reporting, signing off and the auditing that follows after.

Any system implementation process faces challenges during its implementation due to the internal and external problems arising in the organization (YouTube, 2018). These problems can be a challenge in implementing ITSM in the system. According to the case study, the major challenges that have been faced during the case study can be listed down as follows:

Lack of Management Commitment: This is a major challenge arising due to the commitment issues that the management faces due to changing priorities and also due to the organizational changes in the structure halfway through the process.

Organizational Change Concerns: Organization change in structure and in business process has the ability to create a major problem since this decision relies with the highest authorities in the organization. Therefore, the people in the lower authorities have very little involvement in the agenda including the junior and the mid-levelled staff.

These challenges form a level of difficulty during the successful ITSM implementation in a system.

The case study suggests that ExcelIT should implement the Iterative Model to improve their organizational service providing capability. This approach should start with the supervision of at least three consultants having no prior engagement to the organization. The gap analysis should be done to point out the issues with the service management system that the organization ExcelIT is facing. It needs to be analysed for the next two weeks. Firstly, test was performed for the existing service system (Lasrado, Vatrapu and Andersen 2015). Documentation needs to be checked thoroughly including the process documentation and the policy documentations to make out the situation perfectly. Effectiveness is to be tested next by analysing the practices of the organization and this is to be done by interviewing all of the stakeholders in the organization. After gap analysis, the identified problems are solved by redesigning the people, process, product and partner or the four Ps. The internal and external design models are to be checked next with the roles of process management, central point of contact and internal audits. The auditors should be distributed accordingly and ideally, the iteration approach thus run for almost 12 weeks to flawlessly implement ITSM in ExcelIT and should be handed over the ISO/IEC 20000 certification.

Case Study: ExcelIT and the need for ITSM implementation

It is noted that the implementation of ISO/IEC 20000 has resulted in benefitting the organization it has been certified with (Cots, Casadesús and Marimon 2016). The three key benefits that the ISO/IEC certificate provides are to be listed as below:

• It aligns and improves the business processes and their practises. The practices and processes that a business follows may or may not be flawless. This can be a result of negligence, confusion, or many other factors, which affect the working strategic structure of an organization (Cots, Casadesús and Marimon 2016). It may be possible that the organization has failed to satisfy the customers it has been serving to, which is remodelled by the ITSM implementation.
• It build up the relationship between the different departments in the organization, such as, this makes the business adapt to better clarity in definition and communication, responsibility and goals.
• It helps in revitalising the trust of the customers in the organization by ensuring them that the organization is reliable, efficient and trustworthy (Cots, Casadesús and Marimon 2016). This increases the market base since the customers become increasingly intrigued with the organization itself as it becomes clear to them that there is no other priority to them as customer service providing. It strengthens the relationship between the organization and its customers and the organization never has to think about losing its target customer base.

As the situation at the ExcelIT Company suggests, it needs to follow the Iterative framework model to implement ITSM and get the certification of the ISO/IEC 20000 certification (Ding 2015). This would follow the business case justification for the project implementation at the organization ExcelIT as listed below:

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded from the above case study that the implementation of ITSM in an organization benefits to the service management system of the organization. The case study helps in studying the fact of an organization called ExcelIT in Australia that had increasingly failed to satisfy their customers with the services provided to them. Therefore, the video case study that had Mr. Basu speaking about the benefits of ISO/IEC 20000 certification, describes that implementing ITSM in a organizational structure should be done in two ways, of which the iterative approach is much more reliable and popular amongst the others. The report had detailed description about the IT Service Management system and its implementation benefits into the organization ExcelIT. The second part of the assignment enlightened the facts about the iterative journey of the ISO/IEC 20000 certification system. How the iterative model is implied upon the organization to deliver the company with an effective ISO/IEC 20000 certification so that the organization can improve their quality of service management is described in details in the report. In the end, it is suggested that the before implementation it should be properly researched upon to open quite a vast range of possibilities serving as the initial idea to further implantations of the ISO/IEC 20000 certification.

References

Cortina, S., Barafort, B., Picard, M. and Renault, A., 2016, September. Using a Process Assessment Model to Prepare for an ISO/IEC 20000-1 Certification: ISO/IEC 15504-8 or TIPA for ITIL?. In European Conference on Software Process Improvement (pp. 83-93). Springer, Cham.

Cots, S. and Casadesús, M., 2015. Exploring the service management standard ISO 20000. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 26(5-6), pp.515-533.

Cots, S., Casadesús, M. and Marimon, F., 2016. Benefits of ISO 20000 IT service management certification. Information Systems and e-Business Management, 14(1), pp.1-18.

Ding, Y., 2015. Service Delivery Standards (ITIL, COBIT, ETOM, ISO/IEC 20000, Etc.). Wiley Encyclopedia of Management.

Franco, H., 2015. Customer service management system. U.S. Patent 9,224,147.

Galvan-Cruz, S., Mora, M., O'Connor, R., Acosta-Escalante, F. and Álvarez, F., 2017. An objective compliance analysis of project management process in main agile methodologies with the ISO/IEC 29110 entry profile. International Journal of Information Technologies and Systems Approach, 10(1), pp.75-106.

Herrera, P.C., 2017. Innovation in Information Technology Services: Framework to Improve the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Information Technology Service Management Processes, Projects and Decision Support Management. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, 11(8), pp.2003-2010.

Lasrado, L.A., Vatrapu, R. and Andersen, K.N., 2015. Maturity models development in is research: a literature review. In IRIS Selected Papers of the Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia 2015. Paper (Vol. 6).

Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education India.

Lobban, F., Appleton, V., Appelbe, D., Barraclough, J., Bowland, J., Fisher, N., Foster, S., Johnson, S., Lewis, E., Mateus, C. and Mezes, B., 2017. An Iterative Case Study to Identify Key Factors Impacting on the Implementation of a Web-based Supported Self-Management Intervention for Relatives of People with Psychosis or Bipolar Experiences in a National Health Service: A Study Protocol. Implementation Science.

Mesquida, A.L. and Mas, A., 2015. Integrating IT service management requirements into the organizational management system. Computer standards & interfaces, 37, pp.80-91.

Pardo, C., Pino, F.J. and Garcia, F., 2016. Towards an Integrated Management System (IMS), harmonizing the ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 20000-2 Standards. International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, 10(9), pp.217-230.

Picard, M., Renault, A. and Barafort, B., 2015, September. A maturity model for ISO/IEC 20000-1 based on the TIPA for ITIL process capability assessment model. In European Conference on Software Process Improvement (pp. 168-179). Springer, Cham.

Ptak, C.A. and Schragenheim, E., 2016. ERP: tools, techniques, and applications for integrating the supply chain. Crc Press.

Ünal, A., Karaomer, R.B. and Kaynak, O., 2017, September. Analysis of the Practices for the CMMI-SVC in an ISO/IEC 20000-1 Certified Organization. In European Conference on Software Process Improvement (pp. 567-577). Springer, Cham.

YouTube. (2018). Case study: Why you need ISO/IEC 20000 to ensure success?. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/iyJLsV64s2k  [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].