Customer self-service (CSS) plays a critical role in IT service provider organizations’ service business. Self-service can remarkably reduce the volume of IT support tickets, such as service requests and incidents, and provides customers and service users with 24/7 availability to access IT services. Self-service channels can also be used to offer solutions to service-related problems and answers to common issues. Modern customer self-service is implemented in practice by aggregating various self-service technologies and service management practices together. While technologies evolve, this also affects the concept of quality in the context of customer self-service. The purpose of the research is to explore quality aspects related to modern IT customer support, especially a customer self-service portal (SSP). The research problem of the study is: How quality of customer self-service can be improved in the context of IT service provision? This paper presents a unique case study addressing the quality of modern self-service technologies. The cross-case synthesis from four IT self-service portal deployment cases was used to derive a novel multi-dimensional self-service quality model with three dimensions: technology, management and organization.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides guidelines for IT service providers how to design, manage and support IT services. ITIL is the most widely used IT service management framework. It consists of best practices that can be used in implementing, for example service support processes, such as incident management and problem management. Although ITIL includes a wide list of process metrics, it does not provide sufficient information how IT service management process measurements should be done in practice. The research problem in this paper is how the measurement of the IT service support processes can be improved? In this paper, an ITIL-based IT service management measurement system (ITSM-MS) and its implementation project are presented. The ITSM-MS can be used to measure the performance of IT service support processes. The ITSM-MS was developed in cooperation between MaISSI (Managing IT Services and Service Implementation) research project and an IT service company in Finland.

Implementing release management and patch management processes effectively are challenges for both IT companies and IT customer organizations. Patch management is an essential sub process of release management within overall software maintenance. The research problem in this study is what types of challenges are related to release management and patch management processes and how the common pitfalls could be avoided. Data for the case study were collected from an information technology (IT) company and an IT department of IT customer organization, which apply IT Infrastructure Library framework (ITIL). The main contribution of the paper is to describe the real-world challenges regarding the release and patch management processes and present the lessons learned with proposed improvements.