A business-driven IT services improvement model

Abstract

Under current approaches, service performance is generally evaluated using technical metrics, for the following two basic reasons: 1) They are easily understood by technical people and 2) They are typically easy to measure directly. The actual impact on the business of low value and quality are not apparent. Service metrics are objectively measured, however, subjective criteria - those that depend on the subject (person) being polled - are not easily brought into the picture. Uncertainty is not typically considered in the measurement process. Service metrics are gathered strictly on an operational level without any effective information available at a strategic level. Within this scope of work, we propose a model in order to quantify an IT service aggregated value and a hierarchical quality indicator within a time snapshot, which can be used to help managers in activities relating to continual service improvement. We carried out a case-study in a real environment of a Brazilian Bank whereby the results indicate that our non-intrusive model is useful and can be adopted by corporations in addition to their actual continual service improvement rules.