A QUALITATIVE CASE STUDY IDENTIFYING METRICS FOR ITIL® REQUEST FULFILLMENT PROCESS TO CREATE EXECUTIVE DASHBOARDS: PERSPECTIVES OF AN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICE PROVIDER GROUP
Open Access
- Author:
- Imroz, Sohel M
- Graduate Program:
- Workforce Education and Development
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 03, 2016
- Committee Members:
- William J Rothwell, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
William J Rothwell, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Judith Ann Kolb, Committee Member
Wesley Edward Donahue, Committee Member
Edgar Paul Yoder, Outside Member - Keywords:
- ITIL
ITSM
Dashboards
Metrics
Request Fulfillment - Abstract:
- IT organizations in today’s world must transform from viewing themselves as “overheads” and running as “cost centers” into “aligned business partners” (Overby, 2004, p. 50) that meet the operational, tactical, and strategic needs and goals of the organization. Doug F. Busch, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Intel once said, "If we behave as a cost center, we won’t get the most benefit from IT, and we certainly won’t earn credibility" (Overby, 2004, p. 50). An increasing number of organizations have started to shift their focus on IT, seeking now to “run like a business” or “act like a business”. IT leaders consider the transformation of IT not as a choice, but as an obligation and a matter of survival. This transformation has compelled IT leaders to measure and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the services they provide and support. Without metrics of IT processes supporting services, the quality and effectiveness of the services cannot be measured or managed. Although organizations spend millions of dollars every year on IT infrastructures, system implementation, and support and maintenance, many do not establish clear and well-understood performance measures for these IT initiatives. Metrics in IT have traditionally been measured in functionality-oriented silos like the help desk, but IT departments have shifted towards process- and service-oriented metrics to determine success. To address this shift and be able to measure performance and effectiveness of processes and services, a new and improved approach for identifying and implementing metrics is needed. This study examined the request fulfillment process for an IT service provider group, identified that group’s perceptions of the most important metrics of the process, and subsequently created executive dashboards for displaying those metrics. The two primary research questions were: (1) What do the group members perceive as being the most important metrics of the request fulfillment process? (2) How to create executive dashboards with the metrics perceived as most important by the group members? To answer these questions, this research utilized components of the qualitative research approach, descriptive research strategy, and case study research tradition (strategy of inquiry). Study results indicated that the following 12 metrics were perceived by the group as most important: Total number of tickets created and closed per month, Number of Priority-1 tickets created and closed per month, Number of tickets by issue type, Number of tickets by priority, Number of tickets by issue status, Number of tickets by department/area, Number of tickets per assignee, Number of tickets per reviewer, Number of tickets per assignee and issue type, Number of tickets per assignee and priority, Number of tickets per assignee and issue status, and Number of tickets per department/area and issue type. Three dashboard pages (Trend analysis, Monthly operational summary, and Monthly workload distribution summary) were created that contained bar charts, pie charts, and tables using the iDashboards self-service software application to present these metrics. In reviewing recent IT-related scholarly works, there is a paucity of research on metrics, measurements, and evaluation of IT processes—especially on how to identify and develop metrics. This study should be meaningful to a growing number of IT practitioners because it addressed these topics on which very little previous empirical work has been conducted.