process (2010); (4) Knowledge management & Processes Maturing (2012).
COTEMAR’s department in charge of managing IT services was named IT Superintendence. IT services were of the insourcing type. However, there were some outsourcing type areas – mostly regarding systems development. The department’s main objective was to take care of all system requirements and as such it had a strategic level within the organizational structure and was directly supervised by the CEO’s office.
Although the department had technical certifications, it had neither an IT area certification nor any framework for IT service management (ITSM). IT personnel in the department had problems to provide an adequate follow-up on user service requests because of their workload and the ambiguity of their responsibilities and, as a consequence, response times were not adequate to meet their needs. There was no standard way of organizing and measuring their own resources in order to be able to solve users’ requirements.
COTEMAR like many other competing organizations became gradually aware of the need of redesigning its internal IT service processes in order to better organize and quantify if services are efficiently coordinated within the organization. Their first contact with ITIL was by consulting a basic reference book on the topic. They then understood that the above challenges could be faced through the adoption of a framework such as ITIL, which allows a set of processes to be carried out providing quality IT services. The main focus would be on the management of services’ lifecycle so that the organization would be able to align efforts and entrepreneurial objectives, ensuring compliance with regulatory controls as well as client and employee satisfaction.
It is worth mentioning that the motivation for implementing ITIL was that they realize that basic IT services were not actually performing well. This finding motivated an internal analysis that uncovered the following issues regarding IT services: the focus was quite transactional; final service was more oriented toward oper-ation; no methodology was applied; over 60% of the work was not planned; there was low reliability in service and operation and high dependency on technical support services in order to solve prob-lems, although with low efficiency levels. They realized there was a shortfall in organization, follow up, communication and structure.
When COTEMAR decided to implement ITIL in 2008, they had different perceptions. They were looking for a software solution rather than a framework for IT services management. In addition, they did not believe in the value of certifications in this field. After knowing what ITIL could offer to the firm, they decided to go ahead with its implementation. Their vision was to integrate it as a part of the IT service management to generate value for their users, and IT personnel followed a training process.
Eventually, ITIL became a framework that allowed the Super-intendence to measure its day-to-day activities and processes practically, so ensuring value generation for IT service and facil-itating the achievement of organizational objectives. They began implementing incident management (IM), problem management (PM) and a Service Desk (SD). In 2009, the parts corresponding to configuration, versions and changes were implemented. How-ever, only processes related to IM achieved level 3, the rest were still far from achieving the defined goals and, worse still, some processes such as continuous improvement (CSI) were even com-pletely stopped. In 2010, event management (EM), service level management (SLM) and access management (AM) processes were implemented, reaching a level 3 of maturity (defined level).
COTEMAR took some 4 years to implement and consolidate the service management strategy. They became aware of the impor-tance of certifying all IT personnel in ITIL and other IT service management frameworks. So, starting in 2009, COTEMAR began an intensive program aimed at ensuring that its personnel would be certified not only at ITIL fundamentals levels, but also at practitioner