Classifying ITIL Processes; A Taxonomy under Tool Support Aspects

Providing IT services to customers with better, guaranteed quality has been the aim of many diverse efforts, undertaken under the common denominaor "IT Service Management". Lately, more organizational approaches to this issue have been gaining popularity, especially the guidelines of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for IT Service Management business processes. But just like with most other business processes, implementing ITIL processes in an efficient way involves building or procuring IT tools that can support them. On this aspect, ITIL itself offers only minimal guidance. This paper addresses basic issues of supporting ITIL with process-oriented tools such as workflow management systems. It discusses the need for workflow management support of service management processes to achieve service level compliance, and presents criteria for determining which IT Service Management processes can and should be supported by workflow management systems. The IT Service Management processes defined by ITIL are evaluated and divided into four basic process classes according to their suitability for workflow management, thereby laying a foundation to future top-down approaches for comprehensive ITIL tool support.