A maturity model for tool landscapes of IT service providers

In the last years, several approaches and models for IT service management (ITSM) have emerged from research under the business-driven IT management (BDIM) paradigm as well as from industry initiatives. Effective and comprehensive tool support for ITSM is still one of the big remaining challenges. Nowadays, many IT service providers face the problem, that they are using dozens to hundreds of different tools to manage their infrastructure and services. Although such management tools are intended to increase the efficiency of ITSM processes, very complex and heterogeneous tool environments may have an inverse impact. This paper presents an approach to addresses this problem area. It aims at providing guidance in assessing and improving existing tool landscapes based on a global maturity model and specific capability models to be applied to the different topic areas in ITSM.