A Case Study on Cyber-Agility in IT Service Management

Introduction

As the need for IT systems and IT services continuously grows, managers of these types of organizations are searching for ways to maintain and improve the overall performance consistency of their IT infrastructure while minimizing costs. The main objective of this scenario is IT service management, which is a complete set of software-service-based, customer-interconnecting activities and a combination of company policies, tasks, and support mechanisms (Sahid, A., Maleh, Y., & Belaissaoui, 2018). IT service management is part of IT's infrastructure library (ITIL), comprising a large percentage of service and service management best practices. ITIL describes five process areas in its final model corresponding to IT service's daily operations: Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Configuration Management. Also, technical support units implement assistive management processes to correct software failures or problems through predefined procedures.

ITSM is the implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the business. It creates value for customers and ensures they achieve long-term benefits through IT services (Woo et al., 2020). ITSM is not just about the delivery of service but also about end-user experience and customer satisfaction. In contrast, its core lies in aligning IT services to fulfill business needs and requirements. It is an IT service that bridges the gap between IT services and business distribution and management.

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a concept that began with the best practice framework for ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), which the United Kingdom Government released in the late 80s and early 90s. What started as a published set of books with suggestions, rules, and best practices for managing the delivery of IT services became the core of ITSM. Throughout the years, ITIL has expanded and is now the world's most widely adopted service management framework, providing a common language, a set of best practices, and several supporting processes (Abdelkebir, S., Maleh, Y., & Belaissaoui, 2019).

The focus towards Agility has shifted to Cyber-Agility to leverage the challenges of Cyber in complex IT technology and business needs (Maleh, Y., Sahid, A., & Belaissaoui, 2019). Cyber-Agility in IT Service Management requires skills that improve the ability to manage unique transformational cyber challenges and with a growing necessity for removing frontiers in offering dynamic and scalable cyber service delivery. In this paper, we attempt our first step in bridging the gap between IT Service Management and Cyber Security, how Agile methodology can be incorporated into IT service operations, and thus improve IT service operation factors such as an increase in the volume of automation to reduce cycle time (increased Speed), reduce the number of cases and incidents to accomplish better operational efficiency. This paper uniquely focuses on discussing agility in IT service operations, which has not been addressed in the literature to a larger extent. Our paper focuses on bridging the gap between IT service operations and cyber through an introduction to Cloud Service Management in a nutshell and Cyber-Agility.

Nowadays, in the IT industry, there is constant pressure to deliver innovative services to gain an edge over the competition with adaptable technologies continuously. Owing to this, an inherent IT complexity cuts down operational proficiency, manifested by time-consuming tasks, a higher volume of alarms, and more scope for human error. Agile, as a philosophy, is designed along the lines to address the needs of business requirements. With this, methodologies such as Scrum, XP, Lean, KANBAN, etc., improve the delivery output in line with time constraints and can be adapted in the IT service industry to handle operational complexity. During this process, the business requirements and technology operation teams will have a unified vision and goals through stand-up meetings, sprints, and breaking down the release cycle. Thus, the focus was to motivate the cross-organizational team by bringing a multi-functional team to accomplish the task at hand through a brief sprint, clearly defined goals with strong leadership, and reviewing the product with an emphasis on the team, not individuals.