IT Service Management and Quality Improvement: a case study on the IBM and Kyndryl Incident Management Process

The thesis is the result of a corporate experience in IBM Client Innovation Center and Kyndryl, the new company born from IBM’s spin-off. Kyndryl benefits from the centennial experience of the tech giant IBM to position itself as a leader in the managed infrastructure service market. Both companies aim at guiding organizations towards an acceleration of their digital transformation, which is nowadays being enabled by the emerging developments in cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), which all have opened fresh opportunities for value creation. In turn, this has led Information Technology to become an important business driver and source of competitive advantage, positioning IT Service Management (ITSM) as a key strategic capability. To ensure sustainable quality of IT services, ITSM establishes a set of practices and processes constituting a Service Management System, being ITIL one of the most diffused body of knowledge to give guidance on how IT services can be delivered and how they can lead to value creation for customers. The thesis aims to put the attention on one of the most crucial process characterizing the day-by-day service operations of the company, the Incident Management. The process procedures and best practices will be described, highlighting roles, responsibilities and incident lifecycle, whilst its performance will be analyzed in correlation to the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) agreed with the customers CNH Industrial and Iveco Group. Also, in the view of the Continual Service Improvement, new Performance Indicators (PI) will be implemented with the aim of enhancing the performance of other internal functioning processes which, in turn, could help boosting both customers’ and employee’s satisfaction and productivity. These new PI will be set up by starting to identify the process critical success factors, and the collection of data will be conducted using both the customers ServiceNow ticketing tool and follow-up surveys at the end of each Priority 1 incident occurred.