Exploring the impacts of IT service management on the business agility index: an AHP simulation-based decision-making approach

Business agility has been recognized as a core competitive capability in a dynamic business environment. In this context, the organizational IT capability is a co-factor for achieving and keeping business agility. IT capability has been managed through the utilization of plan-driven IT service management (ITSM) frameworks and standards such as the ITIL v3.v2011 and the ISO/IEC 20000. These implementations have produced benefits such as better IT user satisfaction level, reduction of IT services TCO, and improved understanding and communication between IT services users and IT services staff. However, the current business environment continues highly changing with the emergence and maturation of new IT technologies and IT-based business innovation approaches. Consequently, the organizational IT capability is pushed to be also agile and keep its contribution to the business agility aim. Given the novelty of agile ITSM standards and frameworks—ITIL v4 framework, VeriSM framework, and the ISO/IEC 29110-4-3 standard—, there is a knowledge gap on what they are and how they could produce an agile organizational IT capability and contribute to the business agility aim in this modern business environment. This research, thus, compares the potential impacts on a business agility index from the main plan driven and agile ITSM frameworks and standards. For this aim, we design an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) decision-making model using core findings from the business agility literature and the Porter’s value chain and simulate a set of scenarios. Simulation results indicated that: (1) there were differences in the contributions from the five evaluated ITSM frameworks and standards to the business agility index; and (2) the high and very high scores produced by the two agile ITSM frameworks and standards were obtained only when other relevant agility capabilities were also achieved. Hence, this research reduces the knowledge gap and provides initial theoretical findings and insights on the impacts on business agility from the main ITSM frameworks and standards considering other relevant agility capabilities. However, empirical research is encouraged to collect confirmatory evidence.