Information technology service management processes maturity in the Brazilian Federal direct administration

Abstract

This work aims at the scrutiny of the current situation of the Information Technology Service Management practices within the Brazilian Federal Direct Administration, from the perceptions of the Information Technology Managers of twelve Ministries. The methodology used followed the Process Maturity Framework as a guideline, which is a maturity model whose patterns are described in ITIL v3. The work consists of interviews with questions related to the five maturity levels, as follows: initial, repetitive, defined, managed and optimized. Information on the five basic Information Technology Service Management processes was collected. Besides the classification of the maturity levels of the processes, the interviews allowed us to gather information about the possible causes that hinder the improvement of the maturity of the processes. The outcomes of the survey on the researched ministries showed low maturity level in all the assessed service management processes. The Incident Management Process presented the highest level of maturity, while Problem Management proved to be the most flawed one, in relation to maturity. The other assessed processes, like Change Management, Service Assets and Configuration Management and Release and Deployment Management presented some sort of homogeneity among the ministries. As for the probable causes that hinder the improvement of the maturity level of the Information Technology Service Management processes, pointed by the managers, the following one stand out: the reduced staff, the lack of resources, the gap between the organizational targets and their processes aims, and the lack of skilled labor.