History About Information Technology

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Abstract

IT governance describes how IT services should be managed and controlled and defines its levels acceptable to business. It requires the alignment to the business needs through direct problem support and fixing. IT governance represents the way to link between IT resources to the enterprise goals and strategies through frameworks that provide perfect practices for implementing, planning and monitoring IT performance; that is to say, IT governance is the way in which businesses achieve good results through aligning between IT objectives and IT resources.

IT governance provides competitiveness to business as it affects the business performance. It increases the business productivity and quality. This role can be detected only through systematic surveys such as this research paper.

IT service management leads to IT governance as IT Management concentrates on how to effectively and efficiently supply IT products and services. However, IT Governance has to contribute to present business operations and performance, and to position IT to meet business challenges (Van Grembergen, 2004).

The role of Information technology evolved from a provider of technology to a strategic partner. In order to enable IT departments or organizations transiting to the strategic partner position, numerous IT service management frameworks and methodologies have emerged for the evolution of the maturity of Service Management (Sall�, 2004).

Amongst the Information Technology governance frameworks, we find the widely adopted standard �Information Technology Infrastructure Library� (ITIL); since its development in the late 1980�s, it has proved its usefulness through all sectors and become the de-facto standard in IT Service Management (CAI, 2008).

ITIL defines the best practices for the management of IT services and its related internal processes.

Our organization was asked to effectively and efficiently manage and control its resources and IT services and its levels acceptable to business by the alignment to the business needs through problem support and fixing. We, therefore, intended to implement ITIL provide perfect practices for implementing, planning and monitoring IT performance such as ITIL. This research paper will be dedicated in its various parts to describe the impact of ITIL on IT services.

This dissertation contains around 19000 words.

I. Introduction:

Throughout this part of my research paper, we will introduce a brief background of IT governance and its famous frameworks including Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the subject of our study, which will be highlighted along with its implementation process. This chapter will also be devoted to the objectives and purpose of this research paper. Moreover, we will present the context of this research, in which we are going to explain the need for our organisation to implement ITIL. Then, an outline of the whole structure of our research paper will be provided.

1. Background:

The term �good governance� has emerged with the international organizations United Nations (UN) and the World Bank (WB) as their major donors are more and more stressing on the adoption of good governance as basis for aids contribution and loans. Governance accommodates both corporate governance and IT governance. Corporate governance is envisaged as the process of managing the business of company to improving the corporate accountability and to ensuring that corporate resources and actions are directed at attaining the corporate objectives. Galup et al (2009)

IT governance consists at aligning Information Technology to the enterprise strategy by investing in the creation of required structures and processes. The IT alignment results to the delivery of sustainable business value and to ensure that IT governance is properly adopted. More to the point, Service management leads to governance and as such IT service management leads to IT governance. IT service management concentrates on the delivery and support of IT services that the organization requires the most to create the business value. IT governance is realized only when IT meets the strategic objectives trough the efficient and effective execution of internal processes, the management and elimination of risks, the reduction of costs and the measurement of performance. Performance management is one of the best practices within IT governance. The need for performance management begins within IT. This principle is used to make grasp the rationale behind the relationship between IT and business through taking into consideration alignment, benefits and risks and through proving the importance of IT in the business and its users. IT performance management is aimed at identifying and quantifying IT costs and IT benefits by using automated systems providing performance data and information (De Haes, 2005).

The core goal of IT governance, therefore, is to effectively and efficiently align business and IT strategies for a better IT service management. To help organizations move along this maturity path, various IT service management frameworks and methodologies have emerged. After the emergence, in the 1980s, of the Network Management and Application Management disciplines as main drivers of the IT management and the creation of the Network management standard �Simple Network Management Protocol� (SNMP), the need of a comprehensive management framework of the IT function become a necessity. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the Control Objectives for Information and related Technologies (COBIT) gained international recognition as the IT governance framework best to align IT resources and processes to the organization strategy. Here in this empirical research, we privilege the study of ITIL for its wide adoption and acceptance as a set of standard practices to deliver and manage IT services. The framework was first introduced, in the late 1980s, by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in response to UK government requirement to raise the quality of IT services through efficient and accountable use of IT resources. ITIL sprouted to became the de-facto standard in the management of IT services. It collects and identifies the best practices to manage IT resources and processes in a way that leads to providing high quality services through particularly focusing on customer relationship management. This entails the provision of IT services in compliance to the service level agreement set with the customer, which strengthen the relationship between the IT department or organization and its customers and partners (CAI, 2008).

The implementation of ITIL is an incremental process that requires capital investment and time to restructure the IT resources and processes and redefine how they should be devoted. This procedure may stipulate new resources and competencies in order to support the configuration of processes shaped by ITIL. A proper implementation will require the compatibility of tools, human resources, products and processes that IT managers are asked to employ efficiently and effectively (Rudd et al, 2007).

The presentation of ITIL to be implemented in our organization is a real challenge to the whole staff members of IT department due to the changes and impacts that will affect the whole IT department including rearrangement and redeployment of IT department staff. The implementation of ITIL is subject to many requirements as it stipulates the implementation of an integrated IT service management system which will support and control the required processes and tasks. It also requires a sincere dedication of the managers and all staff members as the process of implementation may take years (Rudd et al, 2007).

This research paper will focus on the challenges and benefits of United Nations at various levels of ITIL implementation.

2. Research Context

Peace keeping is the most effective UN tools to assist countries to build peace from a major political conflict. In peace keeping operations, United Nations is capable to integrate military and police troops with civilian from around the globe and deploy them to help countries recover from political conflict and build sustainable peace. United Nations is currently deploying 15 peace operations on four continents. For that reason, it has been looking for a solution to reduce costs and increase values via a sustainable approach, aiming to provide the best services to its stakeholders. The efficiency of Information Technology is vital to the success of United Nations operations. With its wide geographical presence, United Nations needs to align services with global strategy and to standardize practices. In line with the United Nations corporate governance, as it is an international organisation composed by nearly all the globe states that are legally committed to cooperate and support the principles and objectives defined in the UN charter. The commitment of the member states to maintain the respect of international law, the eradication of war, the promotion of human rights and social progress, the encouragement of friendly relations among nations and the harmonization of actions is key success to attain the ends of the UN charter.

The office of Information and Communications technology, therefore, decided to adopt the ITIL practices in the UN entities all over the world and since 2010 the Information and Communications Technology Division has been deploying ITIL practices mission by mission. A service desk solution is also implemented globally to enable a common technology that supports different customer requests and inquiries. This commercial service desk solution is built upon ITIL standards.

Despite the ITIL wide adoption in organizations, there is not much academic findings on the Impact of ITIL of large scale organizations such as United Nations. This empirical study tries to enrich the academic literature by conducting an in-depth study of the impact of ITIL on the UN peacekeeping operations.

United Nations is a unique environment that gathers employees from all over the world for all its components civilian, military and police to cooperate together for the promotion of the UN values that have been resulted from a participatory process that considers the diversity of functions, levels, cultures and the geographic locations of the organization missions. These values constitute the shared beliefs and principles that ground the work of the organization and guide the actions and behaviours of its staff (Charter of the United Nations, 2005).

Due to the recent economic hardship, United Nations is called by the member state to effectively manage and control its resources and IT services and its levels acceptable to business by the alignment to the business needs through problem support and fixing. It is asked to define the different aspects of IT change and to define the project management and control. The organization is supposed to link between IT resources to the enterprise goals and strategies through frameworks that provide perfect practices for implementing, planning and monitoring IT performance such as ITIL.

3. Research Objectives

This research paper aims to consider the impact of ITIL, as an IT Governance framework, on international organizations especially the non-profit environment such as the United Nations peace keeping missions. Indeed, it aims to explore its impact on the IT service management performance. This study will shed light on the comparison between two peacekeeping missions; one has already implemented the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the other in process of implementation.

The following are the main research questions of this research paper:

- What are the major challenges encountered by the IT management in absence of ITIL practices?

- How frustrated is the IT service management in absence of IT governance frameworks?

- What is the impact of ITIL on the IT Service Management?

These questions lead to the following objectives:

- Identify the major challenges encountered by the IT management in absence of ITIL practices

- Measure the performance of the IT service management in absence of ITIL practices

- Identify the impact of ITIL on the IT Service Management.

- Measure the IT service performance after the implementation of ITIL.

- Compare the IT service management performances before and after the implementation.

4. Research Outline

Each research paper is distributed depending on the importance of its structure. For that reason, our research is composed of five main chapters:

Chapter 1 will be devoted to introduce the purpose of studying IT governance frameworks, namely, ITIL and its impact on IT service management performance. In this chapter, we introduce the different phases outlined in our research paper. During this chapter, we are supposed to set the context within which we observe the impact of the implementation of ITIL through the evaluation of the environment upon which ITIL is implemented, the evaluation has to respect before and after assessment.

Chapter 2 will be dedicated to the literature review. A review of all the written documents related to the considered subject. It starts with an overview in which we will define the terms governance, corporate governance and IT governance. As an entrance to study the different frameworks of IT governance and IT service management. Throughout this chapter, we will provide an in-depth study to the famous frameworks such as COBIT, ISO 17799 and ITIL. This later, ITIL, will be stressed on through presenting its implementation process, its impact and service lifecycle.

Chapter 3 will focus on the methodology adopted during the preparation of this research paper. It presents the research objectives and paradigm. Then, we will move to data collection depending on multiple sources of data. This step of data collection is followed by data analysis where we will introduce the qualitative and quantitative procedures. This chapter will end up with the presentation of different limitations of this research paper.

Chapter 4 will be devoted to findings and their analysis. It will be divided into three parts. The first part will concentrate on non ITIL environment where we will identify the IT service management practices and challenges, and customer satisfaction performance measurement. In the second part, we will see the findings of the ITIL environment via the measurement of the ITIL impact on IT service management and the measurement of the customer satisfaction and IT perception. The third part will clarify the impact of implementing ITIL through findings comparison.

Chapter 5 will conclude this research paper with a general summary of the whole research paper and the bibliography adopted for this paper.

Some other parts of this research paper are not mentioned in this outline such as figures and tables distributed in the whole paper so as to better explain and clarify the different introduced principles and theories including the data collected and analysed to be reintroduced as figures and tables.

Acknowledgments and abstract are both presented at the beginning of this research paper. The first is devoted to the thanks introduced to the persons and organizations participated in making this work real. The second is a brief summary of the subject studied incorporated with the motivation to conduct this research, in particular, the choice of IT governance and ITIL as main subject of study.