Towards the optimization of IT service delivery processes in governmental environment

Transcription

1 Towards the optimization of IT service delivery processes in governmental environment Jana DUCHOVÁ, Karol FURDÍK Department of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Technical University of Košice, Slovak Republic Abstract The paper presents a contribution to the knowledge of business process analysis, standardization, modeling and design solutions applied to optimize IT services. The process of submitting of electronic tax declarations was selected as a subject of the analysis. The submission of tax declarations is an IT service provided by the financial government by means of the Tax Directorate of the Slovak Republic. The focus is given on the processes of service delivery according to ITIL v3, which were used for an extension and optimization of processes that are employed on the service provider side. The goal was to eliminate the service failures and improve the communication with users. The proposal is demonstrated on formal models developed for existing and updated processes of the service. Keywords process, standard, norm, government I. INTRODUCTION The shift towards the process-oriented and service-based solutions is a trend that can be seen in the applied information technology (IT) in the last decade. The IT infrastructure providing services integrated into complex processes enables a close relationship and tight contract-based cooperation between service providers and customers by bringing an added value for both the actors. The paradigm of SAAS, i.e., the "software as a service", supported in enterprise IT applications by business process management and proper IT governance, is referenced in [1] as fourth wave of IT, which extends the mainframe systems, separate IT departments, and networked IT infrastructure of previous waves. The concept of services and underlying business processes enables creation and maintenance of flexible, distributed, and highly scalable solutions; however, the qualitative advancement of this approach is the possibility to measure and continuously monitor the performance and business value of IT services from both the provider and customer perspective. The SAAS paradigm may invoke a change in the strategic goals of any larger organization (e.g. a business enterprise, governmental institution, or non-profit organization) towards the transformation of an organizational unit to the center of supporting services [2]. The services in such a center, including IT services, are established and maintained to support specified business goals and primary organizational processes. The necessary prerequisite is that the processes are well defined, established and, in an ideal case, properly documented. It implies that the Business Process Management (BPM), supported by some of process modeling techniques [3], is crucial for the control and maintenance of underlying processes in an environment of applied IT services [4]. Furthermore, the issues of strategy, change handling, application and process integration, as well as IT service operation need to be planned, managed, and aligned to organizational business goals, taking into account the technology constraints of an existing IT architecture. All these aspects are covered by the IT Service Management (ITSM), which is dealing with the design, deployment, and continual support of IT services during the whole service life cycle, in accordance with business requirements of an organization [2]. Consequently, ITSM together with model-based BPM can be employed as a powerful framework for optimizing the quality and effectiveness of provided (or even consumed) IT services in an environment built on the SAAS paradigm. ISBN FEI TUKE 69

2 The content in the next sections is organized as follows. A brief overview of basic ITSM principles, together with the outline of IT service delivery processes is presented in section 2. The status and level of adopting ITSM in e-government solutions in Slovakia is described in section 3. Ways of optimizing the maintenance of e-government applications according to the ITSM processes of service delivery are discussed in section 4. In particular, the approach is demonstrated on an example of the Tax Directorate portal for on-line submission of tax documents. Section 5 concludes the topic with a summary and some hints towards possible future advances of ITSM in e-government. II. ITIL AND SERVICE DELIVERY PROCESSES The ITSM is nowadays supported by several frameworks that provide a methodology, specification of required processes, and implementation guidelines for managing IT services and infrastructure on several hierarchical levels [2]. Frameworks such as COBIT ( MSP ( or PRINCE2 ( are focused on upper levels of IT Governance, strategic IT management, and project-based management of changes. On the operational level of IT services, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL, and the related standard ISO/IEC are world leading and nowadays the most frequently applied frameworks. ITIL is a collection of best practices, composed of five books of Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement, which correspond to the respective phases of IT service life cycle [5]. Currently, ITIL is available in version 3, released in year 2007 and updated in The ISO/IEC standard is based on previous version of ITIL v2 [6] and provides a code of practice, evaluation metrics, and certification schema for ITSM on its operational level. ITIL and ISO/IEC specify the processes of IT service delivery, which are essential for optimizing the service operation maintenance, achieving required quality of the service, and increasing the service provision efficiency from the perspective of both the providers and customers. The IT service delivery processes are specified in ITIL v3 [5] as follows: - Service Level Management (SLM) is the process of negotiating Service Level Agreements (SLA), and ensuring that these are met. SLM is responsible for ensuring that all IT service management processes, internal Operational Level Agreements (OLA) and contracts with external suppliers are appropriate for the agreed service level targets. SLM monitors and reports on service levels, and holds regular customer reviews. - Availability Management (AM) is the process responsible for defining, analyzing, planning, measuring and improving all aspects of the IT service availability. It is responsible for ensuring that all IT infrastructure components, processes, tools, roles, etc., are in line with the agreed service level targets for availability. - Capacity Management (CM) is responsible for ensuring that the capacity of IT services and the related IT infrastructure is able to deliver agreed service level targets in a cost effective and timely manner. CM considers all resources required to deliver the IT service as whole, and plans the infrastructure updates for short, medium, and long term business requirements. - IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) is handles the management of risks that could seriously impact IT services. ITSCM ensures that the IT service provider can always provide minimum agreed service levels, by reducing the risk to an acceptable level and planning for the recovery of IT services. ITSCM should be designed to support the Business Continuity Management. - IT Financial Management (ITFM) covers functions and processes responsible for managing the budgeting, accounting and charging requirements of IT service providers. Furthermore, the Service Desk is required as a single point of contact between the service provider and the users. A typical Service Desk manages incidents and service requests, and also handles all the communication with the IT service users. III. IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT APPLIED IN E-GOVERNMENT IN SLOVAKIA ITSM, and ITIL in particular, has been applied in numerous mostly business enterprises in past few years, with a tendency of rapid growth. In Slovakia, this trend is documented, for example, in [7]. In 2005, the concept of ITIL was known for representatives of only 12,1% of Slovak enterprises and organizations; however, the interest on ITSM and ITIL methods and the intention to implement some of the ITSM processes in near future was indicated was relatively high (over 50%). At the beginning of 2010, the familiarity with ITSM/ITIL increased ISBN FEI TUKE 70

3 significantly and was over 73% [8]. This rate is comparable with countries as Germany or Austria; in Scandinavian countries the rate is on about 10% higher. The survey presented in [8] provides a list of the most frequently implemented ITSM/ITIL processes (depicted in Figure 1), which include namely the end-user functions and processes such as Service Desk and Incident Management, followed by internal processes of Change Management and Service Asset and Configuration Management. The processes of Access Management and Request Fulfillment became popular for the automated processing of user requests. The study also presents the list of processes that organizations plan to implement in near future. It includes the management of the service catalog, service portfolio, availability, capacity, demands, finances, suppliers, etc. Fig. 1 Chart of fully or partly implemented ITIL processes in year 2010 [8]. The adoption of ITSM principles and implementation of ITIL processes is ongoing increasingly in business-oriented organizations such as banks and other financial institutions, insurance companies, or larger IT solutions providers. However, the advantages of ITSM were recognized in non-profit and governmental institutions as well, although the real usage of ITSM/ITIL in practice is not so advanced. Table 1 Proposed time frame of implementing ITIL in e-government IT services in Slovakia [9] Activity Date of completing the implementation State-of-the-Art analysis 4Q a / 2006 Proposal of the goal state and of the 2Q / 2007 implementation steps Configuration Management 4Q / 2007 Service Desk, Incident and Problem 2Q / 2008 Management Change Management, Release 3Q / 2008 Management, deployment of the Continual Service Improvement Service Level Management, 4Q / 2008 Availability Management Continuity Management, Capacity 3Q / 2009 Management, IT Financial Management a Q = quarter of the year. The IT infrastructure is mostly employed in municipalities and governmental institutions for e-government solutions that enable electronic communication and information exchange between citizens and government, or internally between governmental institutions [10]. Assuming the SAAS paradigm of maintaining and provisioning the IT-enabled e-government solutions, the respective applications should be managed as IT services, in accordance with ITSM/ITIL best practices and recommendations. In Slovakia, ITIL was introduced as a promising ITSM approach in year 2007, on the 6th annual conference ITAPA ( Dr. Hlavačka, representing the Tax Directorate of the Slovak Republic ( stated in his presentation [9] that "ITIL is both a necessity and competitive advantage in business area" and thus "the need of applying ITSM is increasing with respect to the grow of e-government ISBN FEI TUKE 71

4 services and with the increasing dependency of organizations on an IT support". The time frame of implementing ITIL in years , presented in Table 1, was proposed in [9] as well. We have contacted Dr. Hlavačka via ; however, we were not able to find out how and to which extent the proposed time frame was fulfilled. In year 2011, upon a supervision of the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, the document [11] was elaborated by the KPMG Slovensko spol. s.r.o. advisory company and issued as a basic methodology framework for the informatization of governmental and public institutions. The framework applies the ITIL recommendations for the management and operation of the Governmental Information System (Informačný systém verejnej správy, ISVS). The methodology defines rules for settings and documenting the processes of IT organizations that provide particular solutions in e-government. Based on ITIL v2 recommendations, the document introduces basic contracts on the provision of IT services with agreed qualitative and quantitative levels; in other words, the methodology specifies the SLA contracts between the Ministry of Finance and the maintainer of ISVS. IV. USE CASE OF SUBMITTING ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS To investigate the possibilities for optimizing an e-government IT service in accordance with ITIL best practices, we have selected the service of on-line submission of tax declarations and other types of electronic documents. The service is provided by the Tax Directorate of the Slovak Republic and is accessible at Since we had no access to the internal data and information on processes, IT infrastructure, and other settings of the service, we have analyzed the web portal from the citizen / customer perspective. Furthermore, we have contacted the Tax Directorate Headquarters in Banská Bystrica with the request of providing the information, based on the regulation No. 3/2010/250. We have obtained the User Manual for authorized electronic services [12] and the list of frequently asked questions that users addressed to the application providers [13]. In addition, we have regularly followed and investigated the situation related to the on-line submission of tax declarations, together with the feedback provided by various users on the Internet. Based on all these materials, we have accomplished a detailed analysis of the current status of the service, which resulted in an implementation of formal models for all identified processes of the service delivery. Top-level model of the overall process of submitting electronic documents is accompanied with partial models of registration, authorization, user accounts management, submission of documents with and without electronic signature, and electronic filling room. A fragment of the top-level process model is presented in Figure 2. The whole set of BPMN process models ( developed using the QPR ProcesGuide tool, is included as the Appendix D in [14]. Fig. 2 The first part of the top-level process model of submitting tax documents, the "as is" status. Analysis of user inputs, questions, and requirements that tax payers addressed to the service provider resulted in a set of identified issues, which were taken as the main indicators for the process optimization and service improvement. The issues were prioritized and grouped into three sub-sets according to the importance and influence on the overall process. Two issues with the highest priority were identified as follows: - Notice for authorized users: The User Accounts Management sub-service is not accessible. Reason of the failure: Increasing number of on-line users can cause problems with functionality of some of the portal modules and, if combined with other factors, may lead to the unavailability of the whole portal. ISBN FEI TUKE 72

5 - Notice for authorized users: The Tax Directorate, together with relevant suppliers, works intensively on the provision of technical conditions for stable service operation of the portal. Till the implementation of necessary updates, delayed responses or temporary breakdowns may occur. Reason of the failure: Planned maintenance of the portal is scheduled for some days between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM. (However, the schedule of planned maintenance for year 2012 was not available on the portal even in March 2012.) The issues with lower priority were taken as supportive indicators for specifying more precisely the failure reasons of the two highest priority issues. Fig. 3 The optimized top-level process model of submitting tax documents, the "to be" status. Optimizing solution for all the identified issues was proposed in accordance with ITIL best practices. Namely, the IT service delivery processes, which were outlined in section 2 above, were adapted for the process of tax documents submission in the Tax Directorate portal. The supportive ITIL processes of Configuration, Incident, Problem, Change, and Release managements were specified and included into the BPMN process model of the service. For example, the optimized process model that eliminates the second top-priority issue is presented in Figure 3. The Service Desk sub-process, consisting of three escalation levels, was included to handle the management of problems with the service availability during planned or occasional system maintenance, as well as various other types of incidents or change requests. The first issue of accessibility failure caused by the increasing number of on-line users was identified as rather more complex one; the optimizing solution includes all the service delivery processes that are recommended by ITIL. The respective process model is presented in the Appendix F of [14]. V. CONCLUSION The Tax Directorate portal enabling on-line submission of tax documents was not accessible during a peak season this year, i.e. in March 25-27, 2012 [15]. G. Dianová, the speaker of the Tax Directorate institution, stated that "the existing portal is not able to handle the pressure before the tax submission deadlines, because the strategic as well as technological development of the portal was heavily ignored in years ". We are quite convinced that these deficiencies are related to the capacity and availability of the portal as an IT service, which can be solved by proper implementation of ITSM methods provided, for example, by ITIL or similar framework. In this paper we have tried to present an approach of updating and optimizing processes that drive the IT service maintenance by a consistent application of processes proposed in ITIL for the service delivery. The presented proposal, even limited by lack of knowledge of underlying technical details of the portal, can serve as a starting point for improvement and continuous sustainable maintenance of the Tax Directorate portal as an IT service that is capable to bring added value for both the provider and users. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The work presented in this paper was supported by the Slovak Cultural and Educational Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic under the contract No. 065TUKE- 4/2011. ISBN FEI TUKE 73

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