Information Technology Infrastructure Service Management System for Small and Medium Sized Service Providers

Abstract

Information technology (IT) is an integral part of any kind of organization today. Usage of IT varies across small, small and medium, and large enterprises. Irrespective of the size of the enterprise, it‟s proven that the success of an enterprise relies quite heavily on proper functioning of its IT. For IT of any organization, infrastructure management is managing hardware, software, systems, network and services used by the organization. Understanding the importance of proper management of IT, organizations pay special attention on IT infrastructure management. Due to various reasons, most of the enterprises tend to outsource their IT infrastructure management to professional and skillful service providers with high expectations. There are various IT infrastructure service providing companies in the industry, offering dynamic IT infrastructure services to other organizations. In local context, most of such companies lay in to small and medium sized category. Majority of these types of service providers manage their operations manually using a spreadsheet which may cause inefficiency, poor quality of work, duplicate of work, customer dissatisfaction and finally loss of profit. Hence for such small and medium sized IT infrastructure management services providers, it‟s crucial to have a proper management system to handle various customers and their services on time with expected quality. In addition to the aforementioned service providers, the small and medium sized product organizations selling their software products to other organizations also see a need of an IT infrastructure service management (ITISM) system to handle the issues raised by their customers. There are many IT infrastructure management systems which are currently being used by large organizations for their internal IT infrastructure management operations however; a system for managing IT infrastructure services is very rare in today‟s market. There are help desk and bug tracking systems available in the market. After having discussions with few local IT infrastructure service providers, it was understood that those systems do not fulfill all their operational requirements. Since this is a common problem for most of such service providers, it was understood the necessity of having a cost effective, customizable automated system for managing the IT infrastructure services after analyzing the operations of such companies and researching on the functionalities supported by similar systems such as helpdesk and bug tracking systems.. The developed ITISM is a windows based system which has been implemented under modular approach using Visual Studio C#. net 2010 (WPF).