Title: IT Services in Practice: Insights on the challenges of identification and specification

Speaker:

Christian Remfert is a research assistant at the Chair of Prof. Klein at ERCIS and member of the Research Group for Strategic Information Management. He studied Information Systems at the University of Muenster, with a focus on Information Systems and Business Administration. His research is focussed on the paradigm of IT Service Management, especially on its core concept, the IT service itself.

Abstract:

IT Service Management (ITSM) is an IT management paradigm highly recognized and widely used in practice. The paradigm is promoted by international industry standards and frameworks, the most prominent one being the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). As such, ITSM has also attracted more and more interest from academia since the turn of the century. Despite its widespread adoption in practice and extant research, there is still much ambiguity surrounding the concept of an IT Service which is at the heart of and thus lending its name to ITSM. As a consequence, practitioners still struggle when it comes to the identification and specification IT Services. In an ongoing joint research project with the university's data centre (ZIV), research on the understanding of IT services in practice and their specification is conducted. This seminar presents the action research approach as well as preliminary results of the project.