Identifying IT Service Management Challenges: A Case Study in Two IT Service Provider Companies

Continual service improvement within IT service management is an important research topic. Nowadays, IT services should be actively developed and improved in order to increase quality and cost effectiveness. Continual Service Improvement enables identification of bottlenecks and weak areas in the services. The research problem of this study is: what types of challenges exist in the IT service management from IT service provider´s perspective? The main contribution of this study is to present ITSM challenges in two IT service provider companies in Finland. In order to categorize results, we used the three core perspectives of ITSM people, process, and technology. These three areas provide inputs to the continual service improvement lifecycle phase which controls and manages the identified improvements. Data for this study were mainly collected through interviews with 21 IT service management specialists.