Adopting Enterprise Service Management Framework in Organizations

Contact person: Daria Goscinska

Topic and research interest

In modern business, digitalization and cloudification have increasingly become the standard of implementing new IT services. Companies with existing IT infrastructure choose to transition towards cloud services because of its benefits in terms of flexibility, reliability, agility as well as savings in time, money, and resources (see Schmidt et al. 2012: 42). Once the transition phase is over, the company has successfully adapted technological change. However, digitalization is also influencing the organization as a whole, with its IT and business processes.

For the IT part, there exists a well-defined and explored management standard called IT Service Management (ITSM), which is a collection of activities performed by an organization to manage IT services offered to customers. It is defined as “the implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the business. IT service management is performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology” (see Axelos 2021: 1). It's most popular best practice framework, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), covers the full-service lifecycle with five phases of IT service management, from service strategy, design via transition and operation up to continual service improvement (see Axelos 2021: 1).

There remains however a gap between the structured IT processes and the non-IT business management, without best practices and frameworks. “The gap between IT and organizational alignment obstructs the adoption of Cloud computing. […] Therefore, the organization should determine how Cloud Computing could best serve its business needs while addressing how it may affect its current IT organization and governance.” (Saidah; Abdelbaki 2014: 674). For example, a server can be (de-)activated within a few clicks in the cloud, yet the approvals with its affiliated financial or business processes take days or even weeks. Additionally, new mode operandi like DevOps enlarge such gaps, being able to modify applications with each sprint, yet requiring updated organizational processes to make use of the modern toolset. In sum, modern corporations often struggle with the traditional organizational setup and therefore require not only an update in the ITSM framework, but also in the management of overall enterprise services.

Research context and gap

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) gives a global perspective on all service-like business processes. Based on the premises of ITSM, it follows a broader view, including non-IT enterprise divisions like HR, marketing or sales, which shall be similarly digitalized, standardized or even partially automated in the same way as the IT services (Mauerer 2019). It facilitates the information flow across units and external stakeholders. ESM is currently quite an under researched area of service management. In the article “Enterprise-Service-Management is only at the beginning” (original: “Enterprise-Service-Management steht erst am Anfang”) (Mauerer 2019), ESM research is stated to be still in its infancy, while modern digitalization is pushing towards standardized and automated solutions. A wide-ranged study conducted among 380 DACH-region tech executives has shown that the term “ESM” is not yet commonsense in the business community. However, while the concept is not widely familiar among the survey respondents and many have not yet implemented ESM solutions, they plan to invest in the digitalization of business processes or ESM tools in near future (Mauerer 2019).

Pröhl and Zarnekow (2019: 279f) analyzed ITSM articles in the time frame from 2003 to 2018 and clustered them according to topics and their popularity (amount of references per year). It shows that while empirical research on ESM is only gaining momentum in the last years, with small peaks in 2016 and 2017, theoretical work on ESM has hardly been published. Because ESM is expected to be a focal area in the future, this dissertation places itself within this research gap. (Re-)structuring the business organization, internal and external processes, and the relationship with the IT units is of utmost importance to benefit from the digital transformation. The need for adjusted corporate processes, a clearer model of business governance as well as an improved cooperation concept become imminent. This dissertation therefore aims at partially closing the post-transformation gap in the Service Management context, by providing more extensive research on the ESM phenomenon.

Sources:

Axelos (2021): What is IT service management?, Axelos website, available at: https://www.axelos.com/best-practice-solutions/itil/what-is-it-service-management (last access: 23.05.2021).

Mauerer, Jürgen (2019): Enterprise-Service-Management steht erst am Anfang, in: Computerwoche, 04.02.2019, Vol. 06/2019.

Pröhl, Thorsten; Zarnekow, Rüdiger (2019): Die kurze Geschichte des IT-Servicemanagement: Themen und Fragestellungen im Wandel der Zeit, HMD Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, Ausgabe 56/2019, p. 277 - 288.

Saidah, Ahmed Shaker; Abdelbaki, Nashwa (2014): A New Cloud Computing Governance Framework, in: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, p. 671 – 678.

Schmidt, Rainer et al. (2012): Servicemanagement in Cloud-Umgebungen – Einsatz und Möglichkeiten von Metaservices, in: HMD – Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, Heft 288, 2012, p. 42-49.