MITA and the management of IT services
In most circumstances, Information Technology is not an end in itself, but a means of adding value to a given business process. This is true for many industry sectors including financial, medical, entertainment, retail and Government. The term value here is of paramount importance and must not be underestimated or left to chance otherwise an IT service will be quickly unutilized and ultimately discarded.
To avoid this, one must embrace the perspective that IT is not only about the administration of equipment and software. The technical knowledge of any given IT workforce must be harnessed and controlled to steer all efforts towards ensuring value by delivering the service levels and outcomes required by the customer. Such control is often a backstage capability referred to as IT Service Management (ITSM).
The Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) has a history of over 25 years delivering IT services to the Maltese Government including citizens. Embracing ITSM principles and related processes while ensuring governance through policies and other controls, has permitted MITA to reach the level of service level maturity it has today.
Like many IT service providers around the world, MITA has adopted and adapted the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as a best practice framework which provides a suggested holistic approach to managing a given IT service. It does this by segmenting the life of a service into stages and guides about how an IT service goes through any number of cycles to continuously align to business needs and hence continuing to improve until decommissioned.
One of the stages, namely the operation stage, provides best practices for managing operational (live) IT services, therefore including approaches for handling service disruptions or performance degradation, identifying the cause of such issues, managing access to IT services and organising the structure of the service provider itself amongst others.
Through a mature service operation stage, MITA can support Government and citizens with the delivery of Government IT services. Such services include, and are not limited to the MAlta Government NETwork (MAGNET), Health systems within Mater Dei Hospital, Government Web sites (gov.mt) and related services, Government email service, schools, local councils, courts of justice, Maltese embassies around the world, Ministries and Departments and many others.
Through a 24x7 presence namely through the MITA Control Centre and using mature ITSM, IT services are monitored proactively to ensure that Government business processes are duly supported for the benefit of the citizen. Such effort may involve technical troubleshooting, system administration, process execution, communication and coordination. These activities often remain unknown to the end user or are widely taken for granted if the service is available when required.
ITSM is an important aspect of IT. Adopting and adapting the principles put forward by frameworks such as ITIL may avoid reinventing the wheel for IT service management and hence moving closer to delivering value, which in turn translates into customer satisfaction.