Lessons Learnt from the Improvement of Customer Support Processes: A Case Study on Incident Management

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely used IT service management framework that provides guidelines how to create, manage and support IT services. Service support processes, such as incident management and problem management, are among the first ITIL processes that organizations start to implement. However, several challenges may exist in the process implementation. The research question of this study is: which issues are important in establishing an ITIL-based incident management process? The main contribution of this paper is to present lessons learnt from an ITIL-based process improvement project that focused on establishing an incident management process in an IS department of a university hospital. Our results show that key issues in implementing incident management are to 1) define the basic concepts of incident management with concrete examples and 2) define process interfaces between incident management and other support processes.