| The importance of IT Service Management is becoming widely recognized. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s interest was still focused mainly on the improvement of hardware, and whereas the development of software was the major concern until well into the 1980s, the 1990s was the decade that saw the rise of service management.
For decades, Service Management had been seen as an extension of development, more of a necessary evil than a valuable element in automation. But recent years have been characterized by a turnaround in this view, supported not least by Gartner Group publications, which show that around 70–80 percent of the life-cycle costs of an information system are incurred in the exploitation phase.
This shows that the exploitation area is a rewarding area of activity when it comes to cost control. This is further supported by the discovery that developers spend around 60 per cent of their time on maintenance. In addition, it is evident that there is a strong growth in the awareness that many primary business processes can no longer function without the contributions made by information systems; in many industries, IT is already one of the primary business processes. Think, for instance, of telecommunications, banking, insurance and other data-intensive industries. The developments in e-commerce also show that IT has become a crucial factor for operational management.
And on closer inspection it will be found that the main day-to-day activities of a very large number of IT staff seem to consist of management activities. Therefore the business needs to get control of information technology and the services based on it.
All in all, there is a flood of signals showing that the organization of IT Service Management is a field to which very careful attention should be paid. And this is in a world that is characterized by an avalanche of technological developments and increasing demands on the time-to-market, flexibility and performance of information systems. |