Research in Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) (2000 – 2010)

In information systems (IS) research, Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) has become a popular research area among IS and management researchers as a result of industry push and the development and advancement of research in service sciences. From academic perspective, a growing number of papers have been published addressing many aspects of ITSM issues. This paper presents the results based on a study of comprehensive review of publications in ITSM from 2000 to 2010. A total of 152 research papers from leading information systems (IS) journals and conference proceedings were identified, categorized and analyzed from the perspectives of reference discipline, theoretical foundation, research method, level of analysis, and research topic. The findings suggest five primary conclusions: 1) there is generally a lack of theoretically driven researches; 2) the field is still improving, with a growing number of published papers dealing with the development of concepts, constructs, models, methods and implementations for theory formalization; 3) ITSM performance issues, justifications, and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) topics are among the most popular topics of research; 4) ITSM researchers do not seem to consider research at an individual level; 5) the most popular research method was the conceptual orientation. Recommendations for future research in ITSM are presented and articulated.