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The above mentioned survey also estimated what companies can save if utilizing ITSM. It proved that innovations on the IT-infrastructure and management level lead to productivity enhancement of the IT department of up to 40%. It has also found a linear correlation between the enhancement of innovations of IT Services on a product or business service level and the companies’ annual return (Hertweck, Kuller, 2010). This means that resources can be saved thanks to ICT utilization and should then be in turn invested into further IT development. This all is possible to be achieved in an organized and effective manner only with the help of ITSM.
DEVELOPING A NEW ITSM METHOD FOR SMEs Although the importance of ITSM utilization by SMEs is clear, the method is generally too complex and demanding to be adopted by this type of companies. A consortium of representatives of the academia, public and private sector from Central and Eastern European region have decided to tackle this situation in 2009. Their initiative, the INNOTRAIN IT project (more information is available at www.innotrain-it. eu), has focused for the whole of 2010 and most of 2011 on creating an ITSM method that would take into account the real needs and abilities of SMEs and show them how to reach the best business performance supported by cost-efficient, measurable and reliable IT. In order to reach its goals the project, which is co-funded by the European Regional Development fund, combines professional expertise of researchers with experiences in business processes. The rest of 2011, 2012 and the beginning of 2013 are then devoted on training the new method to representative of local SMEs and jump-starting their innovation processes. The INNOTRAIN IT approach was not to develop and teach a “new” ITSM standard. Rather, INNOTRAIN IT unites the concepts of the various ITSM standards (Figure 1) that are truly relevant for SMEs and makes them available in a greatly simplified version (Grabowski et. al., 2011).
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