Designing of a Quality Audit Methodology for IT Support Service : Development of a quality audit criteria

In today's business landscape, IT Support has become a key service due to the increasing prominence of information technology in companies. In addition, many companies decide to outsource their IT services, partly to ensure its quality. However, despite the implementation of contracts and Service Level Agreements between the parties, which formalise all the conditions for the successful delivery of this service, IT service quality is nevertheless not guaranteed. This thesis therefore focuses on monitoring the quality of a Service Desk through an audit methodology in order to increase its quality. Indeed, this thesis is a Design Science research based on a case study conducted within a company with the aim of developing a solution, based on an audit methodology, to measure the weak points of its IT support service in order to later elaborate an action plan to improve its quality. To this end, quantitative surveys among users and service providers were conducted in order to develop an audit criteria norm for the company under study. This research produced a number of key findings. Firstly, it was found that the main factors influencing service quality are behaviour of service providers, competence of service providers and the surrounding environment such as different management and communication tools. It was also determined that for this case study, a lack of quality results in a lack of communication between users and providers, long waiting times, as well as undelivered service. Furthermore, the audit methodology for the research was inspired by the ITIL best practice, and more specifically its section on Continuous Service Improvement. The final solution is represented in the form of an analysis grid with several checkpoints. In the case, these checkpoints are selected through the analysis of the questionnaires, representing the potential weak points of the support service to be monitored. These checkpoints are measured through indicators, and if they are confirmed to be below the threshold, recommendations for remedial action are proposed. Finally, this analysis grid was validated by the involved company and accepted for a test implementation. The aim is that this audit report will be reproduced on a regular basis and that the analysis grid will evolve as the IT Support Service improves

An Abstract Framework for Deadlock Prevention in BIP

Part 6: Session 5: Model CheckingInternational audienceWe present a sound but incomplete criterion for checking deadlock freedom of finite state systems expressed in BIP: a component-based framework for the construction of complex distributed systems. Since deciding deadlock-freedom for finite-state concurrent systems is PSPACE-complete, our criterion gives up completeness in return for tractability of evaluation. Our criterion can be evaluated by model-checking subsystems of the overall large system. The size of these subsystems depends only on the local topology of direct interaction between components, and not on the number of components in the overall system. We present two experiments, in which our method compares favorably with existing approaches. For example, in verifying deadlock freedom of dining philosphers, our method shows linear increase in computation time with the number of philosophers, whereas other methods (even those that use abstraction) show super-linear increase, due to state-explosion