Service Managment in Operations Paper Review

I found this paper written by Sue Conger, MaryAnne Winniford and Lisa Erickson-Harris to be an interesting overview of how IT managers understand and practice IT service management within organizations and what this information shows about the overall understanding and implementation of service management. The paper begins by introducing IT service management and describing what its main focuses and benefits are.  After this a brief history of service management is outlined followed by a more in-depth overview of IT service management.

What I found interesting about the initial raw results from this paper is that from 364 individuals (Systems and network managers) surveyed from a potential pool of 5000 only 45% of these individuals where using IT service management and a further 15% where in the planning stages of implementing ITSM. From further analysis and cross tabulation of this raw data It was found that  the use of ITSM increased as company size increased with 60% of companies that had over 20,000 staff using ITSM whereas only 25% of  companies that had less that 20,000 staff where using ITSM. 

At the conclusion of this paper the authors outlined their take on the reasons for the level of ITSM uptake, particularly amongst smaller organisations. The main causes where in a nut shell confusion over exactly what service management was and confusion surrounding the management concepts within ITSM. IT was also noted that a number of managers where simply not aware that ITSM existed. I believe that the points made by the authors in this paper would have had some validity when the paper was first published (2008) however I think that if this research was re-visited today a different conclusion may be able to be made.