Developing a common understanding of it services – The case of a german university

Abstract

IT service management is the prevailing standard for IT operations in practice. It is rooted in the so-called Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a best practice standard that proposes to look upon IT functions as a service provider that delivers IT services to the business. This idea of a service orientation has also attracted academic attention since the turn of the century. Although, the core concept of ITSM, the IT service itself, is still not clearly defined, and thus practitioners still struggle with this concept. Therefore, based on the ITIL and the academic literature, we developed an IT service definition that contains six unique characteristics. This definition has been tested in a case study that we conducted with the IT department of a German university. In this paper, we elaborate on the empirical validation and its results.