Report from IG Service Management kickoff meeting, RDA Plenary 4.

Dear IG members
Today we held the kickoff meeting for the IG as part of the Fourth RDA
Plenary, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This marked the movement from a ‘paper
IG’ to something more active and concrete. The session went well, with good
discussion and general approval ofthe goals and approach selected for the
interest group.
The session began with an introduction to the IG, its chairs and goals. We
stressed the diverse background, from e-Infrastructure service provision to
high level expertise in commercial and public section IT service management
implementation.
Next the session continued with a basic introduction to what IT Service
Management (ITSM) is and isn;t This included the conceptual approach to
services as a way of delivering value to customers, and the difference
between the ITSM view of services as a coherent way to deliver vale to
customers, versus the more technical approach of services as something
running on a port somewhere. This also related to the one-day ITSM training
offered by some fo the IG members through the EC funded FedSM project.
The workshop then moved into consideration of the issues of ITSM
introduction in academia, based on experience from introductions in
organisations such as the pan-European EGI community. This included looking
at existing ITSM approaches and understanding why they were inappropriate
of difficult to implement in academia. This included general academic ITSm
challenges as well as issues more specific to the data domain.
After some interesting and lively discussions, the session concluded with
looking at some solutions to these problems. In particular, we discussed
the FitSM standard which was developed for lightweight ITSM in the
academic and research sector. However, it was stressed that other solutions
would be enthusiastically investigated by the IG.
Finally, we had an open discussion on a range of topics. A lot fo the
discussion looked at what exactly a service would be in the data domain.
Other issues covered what could and should be handled by academic and what
should be taken over by industry, and the difficulty of introducing
organisational and management change in short term projects.
The session closed with a desire to increase activity and gather
experience, use cases and challenges for managing services in the data
domain. Members are invited to collect and circulate such comments or
challenges to the group.
The slides from the session are online in the IG file repository, visible
in the upper right of the IG page at
*https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/service-management-ig.html
*.
Thanks to those that attended, and we look forward to fruitful
collaborations moving foreword.
Regards
Owen Appleton for the IG chairs.