Study on IT Service Management at a Polytechnic College

Information systems of higher educational institutes are indispensable to the education and business operations of institutes. Their maintenance activities should keep the systems available even when their circumstances have been changed in education and business operations. Maintenance activities are not usually recognized as IT service; consequently there are few activities intended to improve IT services because the focal point of the improvement of maintenance activities has been cost and budget reduction. The purpose of the current case study is to clarify the characteristics of the maintenance activities of a polytechnic college from the view point of IT service management. The focal point of the investigation is value-providing IT service for users of the information systems. The ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), a compiled set of best practices for IT service management, plays an important role for our purpose. In this study, the tasks of the actual maintenance activities for the information systems at the polytechnic college were classified to know their characteristics as IT service by being compared with the processes described in the ITIL Service Operation, ITIL Service Design, and ITIL Service Transition which are three of the five stages of the ITIL service life cycle. From this classification we identified needs of users, level of performance of information systems required by users, conformity with business strategy, and other factors to provide better IT services for users. We also identified lack of operations in the actual maintenance activities. Based on the identified factors, we finally discussed IT service management of the polytechnic college