IT Service Management Frameworks Compared – Simplifying Service Portfolio Management

The purpose of the IT Service Portfolio Management (SPM) process is it to align an organization's service offering with its IT strategy. It is an integral part of every Service Management System (SMS) and mandated in some way by each IT Service Management (ITSM) framework, but has been less formally researched than more operations-oriented and structured processes like Incident Management. ITSM frameworks often contain quite extensive guidance on particular processes like SPM, which can make them hard to efficiently implement, especially for small and medium-sized organizations. Furthermore, when trying to choose which recommendations to apply for one's organization, telling the commonalities and differences of the various frameworks is anything but easy due to a lack of formalization. This publication presents a model-based approach to compare ITSM frameworks, to distinguish between the most essential and less essential elements of their process guidance and applies this approach exemplary to the guidance for Service Portfolio Management by ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, MOF and FitSM.