Improving service management in campus IT operations

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims at presenting the benefits from implementing IT service management (ITSM) in an organization for managing campus‐wide IT operations. In order to improve the fault correlation from business perspectives, we proposed a framework to automate network and system alerts with respect to its business service impact for proactive notification to IT operations management.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors first evaluate the effect of IT service management (ITSM) tools in practical adoption followed by experience sharing in developing management process modules in service outsourcing model. Three years of quantitative analysis using real operational data were used to present the effect on ITSM tools adoption. A framework was developed from the study of literatures in service management, incident prioritization, and business continuity planning. For the proposed framework, it consists of a hybrid case‐based and rule‐based reasoning module and a new approach which utilizing business continuity planning for service‐resource mapping with business criticality and user activities.

Findings

For the past decade in the IT industry, a paradigm shift in managing IT could be observed. People are concerned more in managing IT services instead of traditional device‐oriented IT system or network components. With the term “business‐driven IT services,” it has raised new challenges in the area of IT service management, especially with respect to the management of service level agreement with service provider and the management of system and network faults.

Research limitations/implications

Further work should be carried out on the aspect of using real data for the framework as motivated by the limitations of the present study. Practical real data could help the reader to experience its quantitative benefits.

Practical implications

This paper highlights the value of effective IT service management, placing particular emphasis on service outsourcing consideration and the mechanism in service‐event correlation.

Originality/value

This paper illustrates the effect of ITSM tools adoption by analyzing real operation data. The proposed framework explicitly utilizes business continuity planning (BCP) processes to identify the relationships between business services and IT resources that helps to improve the IT service management.

Citation

Wan, S.H.C. and Chan, Y. (2008), "Improving service management in campus IT operations", Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 30-49. https://doi.org/10.1108/10650740810849070