ITIL and the creation of a Service Management Office (SMO): A new challenge for IT professionals: An exploratory study of Latin American companies

Worldwide, the implementation and incorporation of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) & Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) into Organizational Models has become a key issue not only for managing IT operations and processes, but also for ensuring their users obtain better services, and for providing organizations with tools and strategies based on the use of IT to accomplish their business goals. Due to the fact that ITIL does not formally consider the existence of a Service Management Office (SMO) as a way to guarantee its permanence and efficiency once the ITIL implementation phase ends, an online survey was applied to 169 Latin American companies in order to answer the question: What does an organization need in order to guarantee ITIL goes beyond its implementation stages? Evidence suggests that the main challenges on implementing ITIL are the time devoted by the IT staff involved in the project, their capabilities in the understanding of ITIL purposes, and the support from senior management; therefore, the existence of an SMO could represent a way of facing those challenges and realizing ITIL benefits more effectively, representing also new challenges for IT professionals.