Conger et al 2008 ITSM Hiring

Market potential for ITSM Students\

Market Potential for ITSM Students: A Survey Sue Conger University of Dallas, USA

Ramesh Venkataraman Indiana University, USA

Alex Hernandez Plexent, Inc. USA

Jack Probst Pink Elephant, Inc. USA

ABSTRACT

IT Service management is an emerging discipline likely to enhance existing IT program offerings. One barrier to adoption of ITSM in IT academic programs is the uncertainty that students can get jobs as a result of such education and knowledge. To overcome this barrier, a survey of the membership of the U.S. IT Service Management Forum, a practitioner organization, was conducted. The results of this survey show that there is a market of about 15,000 hires per year in the U.S. for undergraduate and graduate students who have ITSM skills, and that companies are willing to hire ITSM-trained graduates. Keywords: IT Service Management, ITIL, Jobs, IT Academic Programs INTRODUCTION

IS academic programs in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world are suffering from the on-going shortage of students. Part of this problem is a legacy of 9/11, which occurred at the same time that the .com bubble was bursting. The perception of IT as a profession has become one that views it as being a mix of complex Java programming coupled with geeky solitary work with eventual outsourcing and job loss (Berry et al., 2006). Some academic programs lost as many as 80% of their undergraduate populations but virtually all programs suffered some loss at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The result has been a general reduction in students, course offerings, and eventually programs. While academic programs suffer, industry is feeling the pinch in having more openings than can be filled and an imminent drop in IT staff due to the baby boomer retirements that are imminent (Dubie, 2007). The pressure on industry to ‘run IT like a business’ and become more accountable for proving its value to the business has also increased. At the same time, unprecedented technology changes offer potential for improving both operations and total cost of IT ownership and, outsourcing has forced more focus on soft skills and a process focus. Thus, the profession is moving away from a development and programming focus to one of process and service management. One response to the above pressures on IT organizations has been the increase in adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®), a product of the UK government now codified in the ISO/IEC 20000 standard (ISO20000Central.com, 2008). ITIL, at present, is a series of five books that addresses all aspects of managing an IT organization, beginning at business strategy and progressing to the acquisition and deployment of applications and technology to support the strategy, eventually discussing demand management in the operations environment through a series of required processes and organizational functions (Conger, 2008). ITIL has become the basis for a growing understanding of IT Service Management (ITSM) that is demand management for IT services aligned to the corporate business strategy with reporting on operational service metrics based on service level agreements and discussed in business-oriented terms. With IT use in business as its basis, ITSM and ITIL offer opportunities to the IT community to revitalize programs, appeal to non-technical students, and develop the soft skills industry demands. A key barrier to the adoption of ITSM courses and programs is whether or not students will actually find jobs, and therefore appeal to academic institutions as a way to increase student populations. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent to which market opportunities for jobs exist and at what level of expertise companies would be willing to hire students from IT programs that offer ITSM courses or programs. The remainder of this research details the methodology, survey and its results to document the need for ITSM courses or programs within IT business school offerings. METHODOLOGY

A survey was developed by a group of academics and ITIL experts and tested on several key practitioners of ITIL consulting. The final survey was developed as an Internet survey and the membership of the ITSMF-USA, a practitioner organization representing about 500 companies were solicited to participate. Of the 500 companies, 360 responded. When more than one person from a given company responded, responses were checked for consistency and averaged when answers did not agree; only one response per company was counted. The result was a response rate of 59% with 295 companies in the final sample. Unfortunately, there is no known count of the total number of companies in the U.S. that have adopted one or more ITIL processes; therefore, the representativeness of the sample relative to its population is unknown. One conjecture is that as 1 Submitted to ISM Special Issue on ITSM October, 2008


many as 80% of U.S. companies have some kind of service improvement activity on-going (Lynch, 2006). Once the sample was cleaned, the results for the remaining 296 companies were summarized; the results are presented in the next section. RESULTS

First, information about the companies and their general hiring practices, ITSM programs, and on-going projects are summarized. Then number of jobs for which hiring was conducted during the 2006-2007 period is used as an indicator of the job market for ITSM-trained individuals in the U.S. Company interest in hiring business school IT undergraduates and graduates of IT MBA and MS programs and the extent to which IT service management is believed important to IT education is then explored. Companies & Hiring

The companies in the sample represent a broad spectrum of U.S. business organizations. As Figure 1 shows, company size varies from under 50 to over 50,000 with a fairly flat distribution across the size spectrum. The company industries span education, government, aerospace, financial services, insurance, media communications, consulting, manufacturing, retail, distribution, telecommunications, transportation, information integration, and IT. The number of IT employees in the sample companies has the highest representations in the categories 51-200 (60

companies, 20% of respondents), 201-750 (58 companies, 20% of respondents),, and over 5,000 (46 companies, 16% of respondents),. These numbers are representative of medium-sized and very large organizations. The number of ITSM practicing employees is slightly less than the number of IT employees, indicating that not all employees in IT organizations are involved with delivering services that are governed by IT service management tenets and practices. The companies that have more than 5,000 people practicing IT service management are in technology-related industries: IT, consulting, and telecommunications; three organizations in this category did not report their industry. Figure 2 shows that the market for ITSM-trained staff in the U.S. is 29,365 for a two year period, or about 15,000 per year. Further, hiring occurs at all organization sizes. The 72 organizations not hiring ITSM-trained staff in the 2006-2007 period are spread across the smaller sized organizations with total staff under 750. The companies hiring over 5,000 ITSM-trained staff are both in the IT industry, while the companies hiring 751 – 1,500 represent consulting (2 companies), IT, financial services, and media communications; the company hiring 1,501 – 2,500 is in the IT industry; and the company hiring 2,501 – 5,000 is a consulting/outsourcing organization. 2 Submitted to ISM Special Issue on ITSM October, 2008


Companies are actively implementing ITSM processes with 221 (75%) companies having active projects that range from one to 16 processes (See Figure 3). Most companies have modest effors and are implementing between one and four service processes at present (104 companies, 35%). This is the recommended practice as too much change and multiple changes in the same positions increases the risk of failure. The ITSMF supports the use of ITIL which advocates basic processes for incident, problem, change, release, configuration, capacity, availability, continuity, service level agreement, and financial management. The most typical early projects relate to incident, problem, change and release management since they are all customerfacing and tend to represent the ‘pain points’ for many IT organizations (Johnson, 2007). The typically last process to be adopted is for service level management as it requires defining IT resources in terms of different application and operational capabilities. It is an intellectually difficult process that requires definition of a service that includes hardware, software, and human resource allocations for a given service (e.g., book-to-bill processing) (Benyon et al., 2006). Companies that are in the 16+ process category are mature IT organizations that are moving beyond ITIL to actual ‘service management’ that includes the demand management activities and that links IT services to the organizational business strategy and its initiatives. Figure 4 summarizes the status of process improvement projects different companies are. Only one of the 295 companies has no ITSM projects underway. Six companies have defined projects but have not begun work; 38 have approved projects that have begun work; 40 companies are in the process definition stage, but have not implemented any of the changes. The majority of respondents (187 companies, 64%) have implemented one or more of the processes and have more improvement projects underway. Five organizations (2%) have completed projects that were planned and plan no other activity at this time. The ‘other’ category includes responses relating to consulting firms that conduct the process improvement activities for other companies. All of these respondents would be in the ‘implemented one and working on more’ category but the work is for consulting clients. This level of activity shows not just that ITSMF is an active practitioner organization but that there are many opportunities on-going in which graduates of IT programs might become involved. The companies hire from a diverse set of sources as their general hiring practice (see Figure 5), including college programs (49 companies, 17%). Responses in this question could be to any number of hiring sources so they do not add to 100%. Most organizations (195 – 67%) promote from within. The next most prevalent hiring practice to obtain staff from other companies that practice ITSM – consulting organizations account for hires in 96 (33%) companies. Other business organizations account for hires in 86 (29%) companies.

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Importantly, the companies in the college hiring category (49 companies, 17%) represent all companies That have hired more than 1,500 ITSM employees in the last year. Even though most companies hire from sources other than colleges and universities, the experience levels hired are consistent with those of most graduate programs and accommodate undergraduates’ lack of experience. Figure 6 summarizes that 136 companies (46%) hire individuals with less than two years of work experience while only 14 organizations hired individuals with more than ten years of work experience (4%). The majority of companies (215 companies, 73% hire individuals with less than five years of experience.

The issue then is whether or not companies are willing to hire IT graduates and the importance of IT service management education to that hiring. The results show that companies are equally likely to hire undergraduates as they are graduate students with 146 companies (49%) responding to both questions. One hundred forty-six (49%) companies indicated that they are willing to hire ITSM-trained students (see Figure 7). Further, when asked how important ITSM concepts are to educational programs, a majority of organizations felt it is either important or very important. In this category, 238 (80%) of the responding organizations felt ITSM conceptual education is important to IT undergraduate education while 226 (76%) felt that ITSM is important for graduate level – MBA or MS – IT program education. In addition, company willingness to hire ITIL-certified graduates is also high with 203 (69%) of companies likely or certain to hire undergraduates and 168 (57%) of companies likely or certain to hire graduate students. DISCUSSION

There are several barriers to the adoption of IT Service Management in IT curricula. The first barrier is that there is no recognition of this body of knowledge in the ACM curriculum guidelines (ACM, 2008). This is an issue that is currently being addressed through the AIS SIG-Services group. The discussion time could be reduced if a significant number of colleges and universities were to adopt ITSM as part of their IT curricula and it became a de facto standard for IT academic programs. A second barrier to the adoption of IT Service Management in IT curricula is the misperception that process management is not a new discipline and, therefore, ITSM is not new. While process management is not new, the focus on specific processes for managing technical activities of IT operations is new. No known programs in computer science, computer engineering, 4 Submitted to ISM Special Issue on ITSM October, 2008


information technology, information resource management, etc. address the body of knowledge needed to support IT operations and the delivery of the IT service as a whole to the organization. The process of, for instance, capacity management, that is how much help desk support, memory, storage, telecommunications bandwidth, and so on, are required to support a given level of service has been an art that is not addressed by any known educational programs. The uniqueness of ITSM processes lies in their inherent reliability on technical expertise, while providing a service that requires management and oversight. ITSM supports both of those activities. Further, IT industry organizations lead academia in their adoption of ITSM and its tenets (Lynch, 2006; Winniford et al., 2008). As a result, there is an industry void in the development of new hires with little experience and process understanding. Academic institutions have an opportunity to improve their student numbers while aligning more closely with the advancing trend in industry toward servitizing what IT does and how it is delivered. The promise of IT Service Management is the complete alignment of services with business strategy such that statistics such as total cost of ownership or marginal cost of adding capacity for an ERP system can be developed with confidence. Another barrier to IT Service Management adoption in IT curricula is the lack of faculty education and understanding, and pedagogic materials. ITSMF-USA, the practitioner organization that is the respondent sample for this survey is moving to rectify this issue. The ITSMF Academic Forum is an activity conducted by the Education Committee within ITSMF. The ITSMF Academic Forum is an annual event that fosters knowledge-sharing and education for the IS academic community. The 1st session sponsored about 40 universities and colleges in 2006; the 2nd session sponsored another 35 schools in 2007; the 3rd forum is scheduled for September, 2008 and expects to host another 40 colleges and universities. In addition the growth of academic interest in ITSM has included attendance at successful panels at ICIS in 2006, SIG-MIS and AMCIS in 2007 (cf. Beachboard et al., 2007), a track and workshop at Conf-IRM in 2008, a track at 2008 PACIS, and two tracks at AMCIS 2008. Recently, itSMF-International announced the publication of the ITSM Journal. Further, workshops and tutorials are provided at many conferences. This trend of activity should only increase. Anecdotally, about 60 universities and colleges in the U.S. have incorporated service management tenets into the MBA IT service courses, about 6 schools have single ITSM courses, and one school has an MS/MBA concentration in ITSM, two schools have undergraduate degree programs. Globally, there are over 20 ITSM programs in Mexico, Australia, Europe, and South Africa. The first two Ph.D.s in ITSM are completing dissertations in Germany and South Africa. Thus, while the U.S. lags the rest of the world, ITSM provides an opportunity that colleges and universities in other parts of the world have adopted. Finally, a fourth barrier to adoption of ITSM in IT curricula is the issue of whether or not graduates can obtain employment following successful completion of a program of study. This survey offers evidence that jobs are available and that students should be able to find employment in service management if they have even one course on ITSM fundamental concepts. The prospects of an ITSM-related job are enhanced by a student becoming ‘Foundations certified’ in ITIL. This research shows that companies have significant numbers of staff devoted to the practice of IT service management and that they are willing to hire both from graduate and undergraduate IT programs that offer ITSM education. As many as 15,000 jobs in the U.S. alone are created annually to staff ITSM positions. The need for academic support for this industry need is thus supported. A related issue to hiring is the extent to which job fairs and other recruiting events have ITSM-knowledgeable recruiters. Anecdotally, recruiters at college events tend to be human resource personnel (HR) who may or may not have any technical expertise and/or knowledge of specific jobs. The two events at which questions relating to ITSM hiring were asked of recruiters drew blank stares, implying that recruiters are not aware of ITSM activities in their organizations or the need for this hiring. This type of disconnect, between the organization desiring to hire ITSM graduates and the HR recruiters of those organizations is an industry barrier to be overcome to vocalize the attractiveness of ITSM as an educational offering. Some shortcomings of this research are the following. There is a need for improved definition of what constitutes an ITSMrelated job. For instance, it could be an entry-level help desk position or could be a technical service delivery position relating to capacity planning, or could be an entry level managerial position actually managing demand for IT services. None of these distinctions, or the many others possible, are included in this survey. Further, jobs by type of student likely to be hired would be of value. Presumably entry level positions would be held by undergraduates while more managerial positions would be held by graduates of MBA and MS programs, however this was not asked in this survey and thus is just conjecture. The sample for this survey was willing and motivated, being active in a practitioner organization that advocates ITSM tenets. This survey, therefore, might be somewhat biased in terms of industry interest in ITSM-educated students. However, the survey purpose was to determine whether or not a market exists and we believe this survey meets that goal. The larger audience for ITSM in the U.S. and other countries remains to be determined through future research. 5 Submitted to ISM Special Issue on ITSM October, 2008


CONCLUSION

This research set out to determine whether or not there is a market for graduates of IT programs who are knowledgeable of and skilled in IT service management practice. The survey results show that there is demand and that the market for ITSM graduates is as much as 15,000 jobs per year in the U.S. In addition to the need for ITSM graduates in the marketplace, respondent companies considered ITSM education as important or very important to all IT students, both undergraduate and graduate. This is in keeping with the ITSM understanding of how to align IT activities and resources to business strategy, thus providing a vehicle for the elusive alignment of IT to its organization. Finally, with the market, and the importance of ITSM education, the respondent companies were positive in their willingness to hire both undergraduates and graduates of IT programs with ITSM education. Thus, ITSM offers educational IT programs an opportunity to regain some of their lost enrollments by adopting ITSM as part of their curriculum. Further, by adopting ITSM in IT curricula, educational institutions will become more aligned with industry practices in the servitization of the IT organization. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Survey development was conducted with significant input from Ramesh Venkataraman, Indiana University, Jack Probst, Pink Elephant, and Alex Hernandez, Plexent Consulting. The four of us have been the core of the ITSMF Academic Forum for the last three years and have been privy to the planning and needs of that organization as a result. We are grateful to ITSMFUSA for their support for this survey. In addition we thank others who worked on the project: Merily Talalla of ITSMFUSA who managed the Web survey and summarized raw results, and Greg Hines of Hines Consulting and Stuart Galup, Florida Atlantic University who commented on early versions of the survey. REFERENCES

ACM (2008). ACM Curricula Recommendations. http://www.acm.org/education/curricula.html [On-line]. Beachboard, J., Conger, S., Galup, S. D., Hernandez, A., Probst, J., & Venkataraman, R. (2007). IT Service Management: ITSM in the IS Curriculum. CAIS [On-line]. Benyon, R., Johnson, R., & van Bon, J. (2006). Service Agreements: A Management Guide. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Haren Publishing. Berry, R., Rettenmayer, J., & Wood, J. T. (2006). An Investigation of Student Perceptions about Information Systems Professions. Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges -- Mid-South Conference, 1-7. Conger, S. (2008). ITIL. In Hussein Bigdoli (Ed.), The Handbook of Technology Management ( New York: John Wiley & Sons. Dubie, D. (2007). IT Jobs Get Hot as Baby Boomers Retire. Network World, July 10. ISO20000Central.com (2008). ISO 20000 and ITIL. http://20000.fwtk.org/20000-itil.htm [On-line]. Available: http://20000.fwtk.org/20000-itil.htm Johnson, B. (2007). Change Management: A Better Starting Point for ITIL. SearchCIO.com. Lynch, C. G. (2006). Most Companies Adopting ITIL® Practices. CIO Magazine. Winniford, M., Conger, S., Erickson-Harris, & Lisa. (2008). Exploring IT Service Management State of the Art. Under Review.

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