Managing knowledge and learning for process improvement: a software-mediated process assessment approach for IT service management

As business users increasingly rely upon services from their information technology (IT) service providers, the demand for process improvements in IT services will continue to grow. Although service outcome measures, such as customer satisfaction, may represent the desired end result of IT services, validated assessment of processes provides an important additional element to process improvement efforts, as they may determine actions that could be taken to improve IT services. In the fast-changing and dynamic business environment, IT service organisations must continue to improve their learning processes, create knowledge and implement best practices that allow them to be able to deliver innovative and adaptive value-adding services to their clients. In this chapter, we describe how we applied the software-mediated process assessment (SMPA) approach to assist IT service organisations to conduct process assessments in a transparent and cost-effective manner. In addition, we introduce a knowledge management (KM) process cycle that illustrates how KM and learning processes may be used concurrently to achieve process improvement within the SMPA approach for maximum impact in the IT service management (ITSM) sector. We introduce and discuss three innovative strategies using the SMPA approach to conduct process assessments in the ITSM sector. The practical strategies include (1) adopting the international standards for assessments; (2) facilitating assessments using a decision support system (DSS) tool; and (3) incorporating process assessments for managing knowledge and learning processes. A KM process cycle along with the SMPA approach is introduced. Key value propositions of the SMPA approach are highlighted