IT Service Management Case Study of EXCEL IT

Question

Learning objectives
This assignment partially addresses three of the learning objectives of this course:

• LO1: integrate the fundamentals of business process management with service management in reference to the value IT can deliver to the enterprise
• LO2: critique current research on IT governance and service management and identify the need for organisations to ensure that effective processes are in place to manage the significant investment in IT infrastructure and services
• LO3: synthesise the nature and contribution of the IT service management standards and good practice frameworks such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), ISO/IEC 20000 and IT4IT™ in providing good practice frameworks for IT service management

Report 1 Specification
Report 1 requires you to watch a webinar video, then draw on the course materials and research relevant academic sources (e.g. textbook, journal/ conference papers) to prepare a report as per the requirements presented below.

Case study: Why you need ISO/IEC 20000 to ensure success?
https://youtu.be/iyJLsV64s2k (1:01:34)

In this video, Mr. Saikat Basu discusses his consultation experience in delivering successful ISO/IEC 20000 implementation case study. Mr. Basu sets a context for discussion by introducing ISO/IEC 20000, then introduces the case study organisation, an external IT service provider headquartered in India. Furthermore, Mr. Basu highlights the business benefits achieved after successful ISO/IEC 20000 certification.

For the purpose of this assignment, assume the role of a consultant who have been hired by Excel IT, a fictitious Australian IT service provider that is seeking ISO/IEC 20000 certification. You will prepare a report to the CEO of Excel IT.

Answer

Introduction
The case study discusses non-IT organizations that have outsourced their IT services to Indian companies.The company takes care of its client’s needs and expectations for those only who are based in India. ISO/IEC 200000 is the international standard of IT service quality and has attained much attention in the field recently. Many organizations are looking into the opportunities offered by the standard and are coming together to discuss the opportunities it is offering. IT catering services are becoming increasingly interested in implementing the IEC/ISO 20000 standard in their companies. These IT providers need flexibility in operation so that they can rapidly respond to the changes in the competitive market. The ISO/IEC 20000 come forward as the differentiating choice which organizations can choose from the IT Services Management Market. Because of the importance of this certification number of companies around the world have already implemented IEC/ISO 20000 and achieved the seal of quality while the other ones are in the process of implementing this standard. The case study provided an outlook of the situations where the necessary standards for an IT company to follow have been discussed.l

Service Management System and How it can be incorporated into ITSM
The service management system (SMS) is the management system that incorporates all the aspects of management system such:

• Planning
• Organizing
• Strategizing
• Incorporation of Rules and Regulations
• Guidelines
• Policies
• Procedures
• Goals
• Objectives
• Documentation
• Processes

These are the main resources to help in designing and developing and converting the product of service-oriented organization into the product as specified by the business organizations. Service management systems are the large customized systems which include most of the aspects of organization involved in service delivery. To evolve into service management organization, the business should understand level of accuracy which is required to become a service-oriented organization. Organizations involved in standardization of IT services such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the International Organization for Standardization/International Electro technical Commission (ISO/IEC) provide standard outline, concepts and best practices for the development of service management systems. (Disterer,2009)

The IT department or IT organization can be the part of service management organization can be the entire organization on its own. IT service management is often associated with service management but IT service management always remains the part of service management organization. The product of Service management can be anything such as food, medicine, furniture, manufacturing but the core idea remains the same i.e. of service delivery and planning, organizing, developing and delivering the services to other organizations or third parties.

The scope of the service management system must be defined in terms of:

• Delivery location of the service
• Clientele
• Clientele location
• Technology applied

The IT Service management framework helps to ensure that right technological process, right people and right technological product is provided to the business organizations so that they can meet their business goals. In general terms the IT Service Management describes a strategic process to design, deliver, manage and improve the way information technology (IT) is used by an organization in order to help their business grow. (Beims,2012)

Iterative engagement approach of ISO/IEC 20000 certification journey

There are two method of engagement approach of ISO/IEC 20000 one of it is Waterfall approach which means end to end certification from top to bottom, a single protocol is followed here and all the designing and application is done all at once. While another one is iterative approach, which is a time taking process and focuses on incremental maturity, the clients always feel that that in this ISO certification a lot of time will be involved but when he gets to understand the result this will provide he will be more than happy to apply it for ISO certification. (Beims,2012)

Here we are applying iterative approach; it starts with the planning of roadmap which includes what all things are required to reach the goal. After this the gap analysis is done to know the present situation of the current design and to test effectiveness of the applied design. A report will be prepared in which the design gaps and practice gap present in comparison to the established benchmark are discussed.

Now the redesigning process starts in which the central system is redesigned for the four Ps i.e. people, products, processes and partners. All these will be redesigned so that they can align with the IT service benchmarks. The governance control will also be checked here. (Beims,2012) The recommendation made will be generic and understandable so that general people in the organization can understand the importance of it and also the implementation of it. These recommendations will then be offered to fifty teams which were made in the organization and will be asked to customize the recommendation according to their need, but the set benchmarks cannot be altered in the process.

The advantage of Iterative journey is that it can inculcate team specific customized recommendation. After this the roles are designed for the process managers for internal audit, designing of roles is a bit tricky because a disinterested person cannot take up the role effectively and cannot give his 100% therefore interest of the process manager must be checked before making suitable selection. The role-based training is provided to the process managers. Next step in the process is to go live process; in go live process customization took place for 12 weeks. In first month of go live process the gaps are being reported by internal audit process and also feedback process was included which took one and half weeks another halftime was utilized in filling up the gaps. (Cots, 2016)

Engagement process took 14 weeks time which is a time-consuming process and it focuses on major business issues instead of only providing certification

The Challenges faced were:
Lack of management commitment-As this process consumes a lot of time and the business environment keeps on changing from time to time thus management may lose focus during any time of engagement process. (Cots, 2016)

Structural change in the organization-The primary person of the organization, who was communicating with the team, moved ahead in the organization, which created the problem for certification agency.

Resistance to change in people: When people don’t know about anything they resist it, this is what happened here also, so awareness campaigns were started to generate the curiosity of people. (Cots, 2016)

The financing authorities do not have knowledge about the certification process.

The ownership issues were there that who will take the ownership if whole process back fires. The Iterative process if ITSM will be used for Excel IT. Although this process is time consuming but it takes into consideration the organization as a whole and makes improvements in IT services in whole of the organization. The benefits it offers are also the long-term benefits.

Present three key benefits of ISO/IEC 200000 certification and a business case to justify ISO/IEC 20000 certification project implementation at Excel IT

ISO/IEC 20000 is the norm of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for IT Service Management. (Mesduida, 2012)

The five key benefits of this certification are:

Effectiveness benefits: It provides value delivery and helps in risk management of the business

Efficiency benefits: Helps in Proactive planning, reporting and review, helps in increasing the customer satisfaction, it reduces multiple risks involved in operational, regulatory, business, legal, security etc.

The ISO/IEC 20000 certificate proofs that the particular IT organization is focused on customers and will be able to deliver the quality services in an economic way. It improves the CSAT results. Renewal of high risk account.

The ISO/IEC 20000 certification provides guarantee that best practices will be observed in the organization. And the efficiency and flexibility of the entire IT organization will be maintained for long term.

The ISO/IEC 20000 certification also confirms that management will be able to provide high quality of services for longer period of time.

The ISO/IEC 20000 application to Excel IT determines that the organization which is seeking services from the service provider and require assurance that their requirements will be fulfilled must remain rest assured about their service delivery as this certification will monitor measure and review the management processes and service and provide best recommendations.

Conclusion and Recommendation
In the end I recommend application of iterative engagement of ISO 20000 to Excel IT because the organization’s business culture defines the engagement method and it should be chosen according to the kind of people involved in it. In applying any of the engagement method the implementation method and the tackling strategies should be properly defined therefore I would consider focusing on whole of the business instead of getting only the certification therefore iterative engagement method would be the best choice.

The lessons learnt by the case study are at present every service industry needs efficient IT management systems, thus ISO 20000 provides the international benchmarks on which an ISO 20000 Provides the following benefits (Nehfort,2007)

Compliance
This is the first benefit of ISO 20000, It is the fastest return to investment, if an organization has to comply with various regulations related to data privacy, data protection and IT governance specially in financial, health or IT industry then ISO 20000 can help the organization in bringing in the methods to help and maintain this compliance. (Nehfort,2007)

Marketing edge
ISO 20000 also provides marketing edge to the organization when the market is more competitive, when it is difficult to differentiate the services of own business with the other organizations then ISO 20000 helps in creating the difference and creates the unique selling proposition for the company. Most importantly if the sensitive information is being handled by the organization. (Nehfort,2007)

Lowering the expenses
ISO 20000 helps in securing the information which comes with no financial gain. It also helps in lowering the expenses in the alterations of the services. ISO 20000 removes the problem of the interruption in service, problem of occasional data leakage, dissatisfied staff members. And discontented, former employees.(Nehfort,2007)

The management complete attention can be put in other parts of business instead of maintaining IT services. The methodology and technology used by ISO 20000 is very efficient in calculating the money you could save if you prevented incident like information theft. But it always sounds good if you bring such cases to management’s attention.

Putting your business in order
ISO 20000 puts the business in order; the information management process becomes complicated as the company grows. Problems like who has to decide what, who is responsible for certain information assets, who has to authorize access to information systems etc. comes up.

ISO 20000 is helps in sorting these things out – it forces to design the responsibilities and duties so precisely that it only strengthens the internal organization instead of creating problems.

To conclude – ISO 20000 could bring in many benefits besides being just another certificate on the organization’s wall. In most cases, it presents the organization with the beneficial IT services which are the need of the time for all businesses at present.

References:
Fox IT. (2018). Successful ISO/IEC 20000 Certification Case Study. [online] Available at: http://www.foxit.com/portfolio-item/iso-20000-certification-case-study/ [Accessed 5 Apr. 2018]. Disterer, G., 2009. Iso 20000 for IT. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1(6), p.463.

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

Beims, M., 2012. IT-Service Management mit ITIL®: ITIL® Edition 2011, ISO 20000: 2011 und PRINCE2® in der Praxis. Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH Co KG Disterer, G., 2012. Why Firms Seek ISO 20000 Certification-a Study of ISO 20000 Adoption. In ECIS (p. 31).

Nehfort, A., 2007. SPICE assessments for IT service management according to ISO/IEC 20000-1. In International SPICE 2007 Conference, Frankfurt, Germany.

Engle, C., Brewster, J. and Blokdijk, G., 2008. ISO/IEC 20000 Certification and Implementation Guide-Standard Introduction, Tips for Successful ISO/IEC 20000 Certification, FAQs, Mapping Responsibilities, Terms, Definitions and ISO 20000 Acronyms

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.

Cots, S. and Casadesús, M., 2013. Implementing ISO 20000: proposals from learned lessons. TMQ-Techniques, Methodologies and Quality, 4.

Mesquida, A.L., Mas, A., Amengual, E. and Calvo-Manzano, J.A., 2012. IT Service Management Process Improvement based on ISO/IEC 15504: A systematic review. Information and Software Technology, 54(3), pp.239-247

Barafort, B., Betry, V., Cortina, S., Picard, M.St Jean, M., Renault, A., Valdés, O. and Tudor, P.R.C.H., 2009. ITSM Process Assessment Supporting ITIL: Using TIPA to Assess and Improve your Processes with ISO 15504 and Prepare for ISO 20000 Certification vol. 217. Zaltbommel, Netherlands: Van Haren.