Toward an Agile IT Service Management Framework

For a couple of decades, information technology (IT) as well as its management have been evolving toward more agility. Cloud computing and service-oriented computing have enabled increases in the agility of, respectively, the hardware and the software components of IT services. Similarly, companies more and more often use agile methods for managing their IT projects. This means that many IT organizations can follow the values and principles of the Agile theory, which shares many similarities with service science. However, regarding the management of IT operations, existing solutions are largely process oriented and focus on the control and respect of the initial commitments. Therefore, these solutions, called IT service management (ITSM) methods, are not aligned with the agile values and principles. In response, we propose the basics of a future agile IT service management framework. To do so, we revisit the agile values and principles applied in the software development to best suit the ITSM context. We also identify some practices applied in the current ITSM methods that (partially) block the evolution toward more agility in ITSM. These practices are discussed and rewritten accordingly.