Research And Implementation Of An ITIL-based IT Service Management Model For Universities

As a source of the best practice in IT Service Management, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has been adopted by more and more organizations worldwide to establish and improve their capabilities in Information Technology (IT) Service Management. Over the years, with the continuous depth of information construction and applications of IT, the level of informatization in universities has made an unprecedented improvement and IT environment is becoming more and more complicated. IT, which is closely linked with learning, working and life of teachers and students, has been applied far and wide to teaching, research, handling official business, administration and so on. Additionally, demand for higher quality of IT services has grown increasingly. The result is that IT department in universities has faced the challenge of how to provide measurable IT services to its users with better, guaranteed quality.Based on deeply analyzing the main concepts and rationale of IT Service Management as well as the status quo of IT services at colleges, this paper proposes an ITIL-based IT service management model for universities and designs the model concretely according to three essential elements of IT service management: Process, People and Technology. Many processes-such as the process of incident-management, problem-management, change-management and so forth-are integrated into the model. At the same time, the concept of IT service lifecycle is introduced, which makes those isolated processes associated more tightly. The result is a transition from the traditional IT management mode to a user-centric, service-oriented one, which makes IT service and campus business well integrated.Petri net theory is included to model the process of incident, problem, change management and so forth and to simply estimate the rationality of the model using analysis method of coverability graph. Also included is how to design and develop a flexible, easily extensible prototype system based on Java EE architecture with the integration of lightweight workflow engine OSWorkflow and other technologies, which provides a concrete technical tool for the implementation of IT service management in universities. Finally, this paper takes the example of incident-management process to present how the mechanism of the prototype system works in details.