On electronic process guides for IT service management
Mora, ManuelORCID: 0000-0003-1631-5931, O'Connor, RoryORCID: 0000-0002-2446-3224 and Gelman, Ovsei
(2010)
On electronic process guides for IT service management.
In: The SIG SVC Annual Workshop, at 14th International Conference on Information Systems, St Louis, MI.
IT practitioners interested in implementing IT Service Management processes (like ISO/IEC 20000; CMMI-SVC, ITIL v2, or ITIL v3, or proprietary process models as ITUP (IBM), MOF 3.0/4.0 (Microsoft) are faced with the challenge to consult complex documents for learning and training purposes.. Such documents contain an inherent complexity by the number of schemes, categories, activities, roles, forms, techniques, concepts, attributes, and their interrelationships. Given this problem, a research stream (in Software Engineering discipline) has been focused on the design, implementation and evaluation of electronic process guides (EPGs). EPGs are digital documents which describe organizational processes for training and guiding real execution purposes, and which contains all required documents as well as sample of them. EPGs are not intended for enacting an organizational process (like a business process manager system) but for supporting their correct execution for human participants. We believe that EPGs can be useful for ITSM management. Thus, in this research in progress, we report: (i) a review of characteristics of EPGs, (ii) an EPG evaluation framework, and (iii) a conceptual evaluation of three open access EPGs. Two for IT Service Management (ITUP, MOF 4.0) and one for Software Engineering process (OpenUP). Our final research aim, is identifying enhancement opportunities for the design of EPGs by using ontology technology. Implications for ITSM are finally discussed.