Framework of Six Sigma implementation analysis on SMEs in Malaysia for information technology services, products and processes

For the past two decades, the majority of Malaysia’s IT companies have been widely adopting a Quality Assurance (QA) approach as a basis for self-improvement and internal-assessment in IT project management. Quality Control (QC) is a comprehensive top-down observation approach used to fulfill requirements for quality outputs which focuses on the aspect of process outputs evaluation. However in the Malaysian context, QC and combination of QA and QC as a means of quality improvement approaches have not received significant attention. This research study aims to explore the possibility of integrating QC and QA+QC approaches through Six Sigma quality management standard to provide tangible and measureable business results by continuous process improvement to boost customer satisfactions. The research project adopted an exploratory case study approach on three Malaysian IT companies in the business area of IT Process, IT Service and IT Product. Semi-structured interviews, online surveys, self-administered questionnaires, job observations, document analysis and on-the-job-training are amongst the methodologies employed in these case studies. These collected data and viewpoints along with findings from an extensive literature review were used to benchmark quality improvement initiatives, best practices and to develop a Six Sigma framework for the context of the SMEs in the Malaysian IT industry. This research project contributed to both the theory and practice of implementing and integrating Six Sigma in IT products, services and processes. The newly developed framework has been proven capable of providing a general and fundamental start-up decision by demonstrating how a company with and without formal QIM can be integrated and implemented with Six Sigma practices to close the variation gap between QA and QC. This framework also takes into consideration those companies with an existing QIM for a new face-lift migration without having to drop their existing QIM. This can be achieved by integrating a new QIM which addresses most weaknesses of the current QIM while retaining most of the current business routine strengths. This framework explored how Six Sigma can be expanded and extended to include secondary external factors that are critical to successful QIM implementation. A vital segment emphasizes Six Sigma as a QA+QC approach in IT processes; and the ability to properly manage IT processes will result in overall performance improvement to IT Products and IT Services. The developed Six Sigma implementation framework can serve as a baseline for SMEs to better manage, control and track business performance and product quality; and at the same time creates clearer insights and un-biased views of Six Sigma implementation onto the IT industries to drive towards operational excellence

Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks

Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation, ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further, we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across 675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201

Framework of Six Sigma implementation analysis on SMEs in Malaysia for information technology services, products and processes

For the past two decades, the majority of Malaysia’s IT companies have been widely adopting a Quality Assurance (QA) approach as a basis for self-improvement and internal-assessment in IT project management. Quality Control (QC) is a comprehensive top-down observation approach used to fulfill requirements for quality outputs which focuses on the aspect of process outputs evaluation. However in the Malaysian context, QC and combination of QA and QC as a means of quality improvement approaches have not received significant attention. This research study aims to explore the possibility of integrating QC and QA+QC approaches through Six Sigma quality management standard to provide tangible and measureable business results by continuous process improvement to boost customer satisfactions. The research project adopted an exploratory case study approach on three Malaysian IT companies in the business area of IT Process, IT Service and IT Product. Semi-structured interviews, online surveys, self-administered questionnaires, job observations, document analysis and on-the-job-training are amongst the methodologies employed in these case studies. These collected data and viewpoints along with findings from an extensive literature review were used to benchmark quality improvement initiatives, best practices and to develop a Six Sigma framework for the context of the SMEs in the Malaysian IT industry. This research project contributed to both the theory and practice of implementing and integrating Six Sigma in IT products, services and processes. The newly developed framework has been proven capable of providing a general and fundamental start-up decision by demonstrating how a company with and without formal QIM can be integrated and implemented with Six Sigma practices to close the variation gap between QA and QC. This framework also takes into consideration those companies with an existing QIM for a new face-lift migration without having to drop their existing QIM. This can be achieved by integrating a new QIM which addresses most weaknesses of the current QIM while retaining most of the current business routine strengths. This framework explored how Six Sigma can be expanded and extended to include secondary external factors that are critical to successful QIM implementation. A vital segment emphasizes Six Sigma as a QA+QC approach in IT processes; and the ability to properly manage IT processes will result in overall performance improvement to IT Products and IT Services. The developed Six Sigma implementation framework can serve as a baseline for SMEs to better manage, control and track business performance and product quality; and at the same time creates clearer insights and un-biased views of Six Sigma implementation onto the IT industries to drive towards operational excellence

Proactive IT Incident Prevention: Using Data Analytics to Reduce Service Interruptions

The cost of resolving user requests for IT assistance rises annually. Researchers have demonstrated that data warehouse analytic techniques can improve service, but they have not established the benefit of using global organizational data to reduce reported IT incidents. The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to examine the extent to which IT staff use of organizational knowledge generated from data warehouse analytical measures reduces the number of IT incidents over a 30-day period, as reported by global users of IT within an international pharmaceutical company headquartered in Germany. Organizational learning theory was used to approach the theorized relationship between organizational knowledge and user calls received. Archival data from an internal help desk ticketing system was the source of data, with access provided by the organization under study. The population for this study was all calls logged and linked to application systems registered in a configuration database, and the sample was the top 14 application systems with the highest call volume that were under the control of infrastructure management. Based on an analysis of the data using a split-plot ANOVA (SPANOVA) of Time 1, Time 2, treatment, and nontreatment data, there was a small reduction in calls in the number of reported IT incidents in the treatment group, though the reduction was not statistically significant. Implications for positive social change include reassigning employees to other tasks, rather than continuing efforts in this area, enabling employees to support alternative initiatives to drive the development of innovative therapies benefiting patients and improving employee satisfaction

Implementing the Information Technology Information Library (Itil) Framework

This project proposes the implementation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework for a mid-sized Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) specializing in commercial warehouses. Due to rapid growth, lack of process and lack of business visibility, the Information Technology (IT) department struggles to provide highly reliable business systems that meet the requirements for the business. The gap in business relationships results in a negative image for the IT department and causes situations where individual business groups contract directly with outsourced IT providers. After developing the IT solution, the business group contacts the internal IT department for involvement with the deployment. The IT department must ensure the outsourced solution will work with internal IT systems or networks regardless of the technology stack or support model. Often, the costs associated with this last minute support are not captured or reported within the overall outsourced IT project. The IT department consulted with Forrester research and Capgemini to review the overall IT environment and process maturity. After performing the review and analyzing the findings, IT management determined that process improvement was required to improve overall IT services and IT service delivery speed. Rather than focus on what led to the decision to implement ITIL, this project will discuss how ITIL provided the foundation to ensure timely, consistent and reliable delivery of IT Services. ITIL also helped improve the IT departments\u27 image with the business by assisting in higher quality implementations and consistency resulting in less IT downtime and more controlled IT systems. When asked about the benefit of ITIL, Carie Zoellner-Buell, a VP of Global Infrastructure and Operations said, ITIL has taken the organization to a whole new level of operation that we were never able to attain in the past. Using ITIL based processes has allowed us to be much more effective in managing IT by adding structure and efficiency

Automated Ticket Routing Helpdesk Portal

This report was commissioned to deliver the understanding of the chosen Final Year Project title "Automated Ticket Routing Helpdesk Portal". The report will be segregated into four chapters which are the introduction including problem statement and objectives; literature review; methodology and conclusion. Helpdesk is a very powerful tool to assist IT users. A good helpdesk system is very crucial to assist users and also improve service by the helpdesk team. At Universiti Teknologi Petronas, we already have an existing helpdesk system. However, I have identified a problem in the system; the current system still uses manual ticket routing and assignment. Automated ticket routing and assignment stop manually assigning tickets to the support personnel that you think is available and has the skill set to address the ticket. Automated ticket routing and assignment uses intelligent business logic to determine which support personnel is assigned to a new ticket using a combination of skill-set, work schedule and work load balancing criteria. In the introduction, problem statements that lead to the idea of developing the project title will be cleared up and the objectives are highlighted. Towards the development of this project, information gathering from the experts will be conducted. A comprehensive research also will determine the relevancy of this project. The literature reviews will explain in depth the understanding of the proposed project

Dashboard design applied to the ITIL®V3 problem management process: A case study at ISCTE-IUL

ACM classification: K.6 Management of Computing and Information SystemsISCTE-IUL is a Portuguese higher education institute that is oriented to the ITIL®V3 adoption for the Information Technology (IT) Services, in order to improve the management practices in accordance with best practices recommended and to achieve the ISO/IEC 20000 certification. Dissertations have been related with the ITIL processes implementation, having already implemented the Asset Management, Incident Management, Request Fulfillment and the Change Management processes. The scope of this dissertation is the implementation of the Problem Management process that will fills the gap in the problem root-cause investigation. The Problem Management process defines the activities required to control the flow of problems and ensure the correct recording, evaluation, investigation and solution implementation. This dissertation describes the evaluation of the current problem management process at ISCTE-IUL and the transition to a new process developed according to the best practices and modeled with the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). As recommended by ITIL, the processes must be monitored and measured using appropriate metrics. In line with this, was defined the second phase of the dissertation, the process measurement. In this phase are designed and built Service Operation Dashboards covering the Incident Management, Request Fulfillment and Problem Management processes. This measurement is performed through Microsoft Excel, analyzing the data extracted from the EasyVista, an ITSM platform. The goal is to analyze the data and provide reliable information to enable the decision-making based on facts, identifying trends and the levels of effectiveness and efficiency.O ISCTE-IUL é um instituto superior de educação Português, orientado à adoção do ITIL®V3 nos seus serviços das Tecnologias da Informação (TI). Melhorando assim as práticas de gestão, de acordo com as melhores práticas recomendadas e atingir a certificação ISO/IEC 20000. Dissertações relacionadas com a implementação dos processos de ITIL têm surgido, estando atualmente implementados os processos de Gestão de Ativos de Serviço, Gestão de Incidentes, Satisfação de Pedidos e Gestão de Alterações. O âmbito desta dissertação é a implementação do processo de Gestão de Problemas que irá preencher a lacuna na investigação da causa-raiz dos problemas. O processo de Gestão de Problemas define as atividades necessárias para controlar o fluxo de problemas e assegurar o correto registo, avaliação, investigação e implementação da solução. Nesta dissertação é descrita a avaliação ao estado atual do processo presente no ISCTE-IUL e a sua transição para o novo processo, desenvolvido de acordo com as melhores práticas e modelado com a Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Segundo recomendações do ITIL, os processos devem ser avaliados utilizando métricas apropriadas. Foi assim definida a segunda fase da dissertação, contemplando a medição dos processos. Foram desenhados e construídos Dashboards da Operação do Serviço, abrangendo os processos de Gestão de Incidentes, Satisfação de Pedidos e Gestão de Problemas. Esta medição é executada através da ferramenta Microsoft Excel, analisando os dados extraídos do EasyVista, uma plataforma de Gestão de Serviços das TI (ITSM).O objetivo é analisar os dados e fornecer informação fidedigna, permitindo a tomada de decisão baseada em factos, identificando tendências e os níveis de eficácia e eficiência

Towards a Business Process Complexity Analysis Framework Based on Textual Data and Event Logs

Being an established discipline, Business Process Management (BPM) confronts various challenges related to digitization and rapid penetration of technologies into business processes (BPs). As a result, both generated and used data, such as textual data and event logs, grow exponentially, complicating the decision-making. Event logs are typically used to analyze BPs from several perspectives, including complexity. Recent approaches to BP complexity analyses focus on BP models and event logs, limiting the consideration of textual data. Hence, we propose a BP complexity analysis framework combining textual data and event logs. The framework has been conceptualized based on the IT Service Management (ITSM) case study of an international telecom provider and further developed in the IT department of an academic institution. The latter has also been used to investigate the value of the framework. Our preliminary findings show that the framework can enable comprehensive process redesign and improvements