Introducing process-oriented IT service management at an academic computing center: An interim report

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, LRZ) is a service provider for a variety of academic institutions, mainly in the Munich (Germany) area. The services provided range from network services, server hosting, application services to specialized supercomputing services. Even in academia, computing services become ever more business critical : IT services for university spin-offs, virtual labs provided to other universities as an application service, and an increasing number of industry cooperation projects require highly available and reliable services. As scope, volume, complexity and required quality of services increase, financial and personal resources to provide these do not (at least not on the same scale). The only way to meet this challenge is to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency. Such improvements do not seem achievable just by purchasing or developing more management tools (the LRZ already uses an abundance of management software applications). Addressing the, in the past often somewhat neglected, organizational aspects of IT service management (ITSM), i.e. process-oriented ITSM, promises to yield much better gains in efficiency. A project to introduce process-oriented IT service management at the LRZ was started at the end of 2007. This presentation outlines the motivation and scope of this long-running (3-4 years), multi-faceted project, and presents and interim report on results and experiences in the introduction of process-oriented ITSM at a large academic computing center.