IT Service Management Best Practices in Insurance Industries

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is the set of processes and professional disciplines that are used to manage the design, planning, and service delivery within the Information Technology (IT) environment in an organisation. It is estimated that 80% of ITSM projects in the South African insurance industry are unable to meet their objectives due to organisations failing to fully embrace and implement the ITSM fundamentals holistically. Two South African insurance organisations listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) whose responsibilities are within IT operations were part of the study. The study adopted a qualitative research methodology and data were collected using a questionnaire research instrument. The questionnaire was administered on the Monkey Survey online platform with the link sent to 230 employees and acquired 118 responses. The study noted that both organisations have implemented ITSM in driving perceived service delivery, while employees did not appear to acknowledge the underlying ITSM fundamentals. This finding implies that the organisation may be poorly controlling IT costs, that there is an absence of continual improvement, and the organisation may have ineffective IT capabilities. The present study provides a detailed evaluation of the popular and commonly used ITSM framework’s implementational challenges within the South African insurance industry and highlights the significant misconception among the employees regarding ITSM fundamentals and principles as a means of service delivery improvement.