A general process-model to analyze and optimize the tool-landscape of IT Service Providers

It Service Management frameworks like the IT Infrastructur e Library [3] (ITIL) or ISO/IEC 20000 [1] enable service providers to manage their IT components and services in an efficient way. As IT infrastructures get more and more complex, this cannot be achieved without the support of management tools like trouble-ticket system, workow systems, conjuration management databases, service monitoring and many others. Nowadays, many service providers use up to 100 and more different tools to manage their infrastructure [4]. This often results in the problem that service providers have a less efficient tool-landscape with many redundant functions. As neither ITIL nor other frameworks address this problem specially, this paper points out the proposition of a PhD thesis to deal with it. This paper proposes a maturity model to effectively rate tool-landscapes, determine weaknesses and compare them to others. Further, based on the maturity model, it describes a process-model to manage, consolidate and improve them.