Activity-based management of IT service delivery

Abstract

Growth, adaptability, innovation, and cost control are leading concerns of businesses, especially with respect to use of information technology (IT). Though standards such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) offer the potential for cost savings through the use of formal processes and best practices, such top-down approaches tend to be either highlevel - often far removed from the actual work - or low-level - often inflexible given the rapid pace of technology and market change. We conducted field studies to examine work practices in IT service delivery. Our results suggest that unstructured work activities comprise a significant and vital portion of the overall work done by people in IT service delivery. These activities include negotiating work items and schedules, seeking and providing information and expertise, and using and sharing custom tools and practices. Unstructured activities are conducted in parallel to formal, structured IT service processes, but are not well supported by existing integrated tooling. Thus, they are not easily accounted for and rarely result in reusable assets or feedback to improve the formal IT processes. Based on these findings, we propose an administrator workspace aimed specifically at blending structured and unstructured work activities to support effective, reusable, and quantifiable IT service delivery. Copyright 2007 ACM.