Analysis of Information Technology Service Management at Target Corp

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) implementation within Target Corporation, a major retail chain. It begins with an introduction to ITSM and its relevance, followed by a company overview of Target Australia. The discussion section delves into ITSM and ITIL frameworks, exploring various aspects of ITSM at Target, including governance, risks, service strategy (portfolio, financial, demand, and business relationship management), service design (IT service continuity, information security), service operation (problem, incident, and event management), and continual service improvement (Deming cycle). The report highlights how Target utilizes ITSM to enhance its business processes, improve communication, and optimize resource management. The report concludes with an overview of the benefits of ITSM and its impact on Target's overall business proposition, emphasizing the importance of ITSM in modern retail environments.

Running head: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Information Technology Service Management
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Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................2
Company overview:...............................................................................................................2
Discussion:.................................................................................................................................3
ITSM and ITIL:......................................................................................................................3
Aspects of ITSM at Target Corporation:...................................................................................3
Service Strategy:....................................................................................................................4
Service Design:......................................................................................................................6
Service Operation:..................................................................................................................7
Continual Service Improvement:...........................................................................................8
Service Delivery:....................................................................................................................8
ITSM and professional culture:..................................................................................................9
ITSM in enhancing business proposition:..................................................................................9
Conclusion:..............................................................................................................................11
References:...............................................................................................................................12

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Introduction:
Information Technology Service Management is defined as a complete set of
activities that are required to provide services within an organisation. Information technology
service management is a type of management tool that has the benefit to be customized and
implemented according to business needs of the company. Information technology service
management is type of approach that is taken towards management focusing on the need of
customers for IT services (Alexander & Mason, 2017). Information technology service
management has ties with other IT approaches like software engineering, information
security and quality management. Information technology service management has its
application in various fields such as in financial services, health cares, higher education
services, public sectors and most importantly in retail sectors. Retail sectors are one of the
pertinent industries in the world of ITSM. Advanced retail chains help in bringing in
improved communication, efficiency and communication in the business process. The task of
store management becomes much easier in retail industry with the help of Information
Technology Service tool while improving the control and quality of the retail products. The
following report is prepared so as to reflect the application of Internet Technology Service
Management at a well-known retail company called Target Corporation and to describe
various approaches of it.
Company overview:
Target Australia is one of the largest store chain department in Australia operating
over 294 stores through the entire country. The company of Target corporation is responsible
for selling products related to branded clothes, electronics, homewares, fitness and cosmetics.
The company of Target Australia is founded in the year 1926 and had its headquarters at
Williams Landing, Victoria Australia. The company is responsible for offering products via

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online mode as well as via catalogue. The company of Target Corporation was formerly
known as the Lindsay’s Target Pty. Ltd. And later changed its name to Target Australia. The
organisation of Target Australia operates as a subsidiary of the Wesfarmers Limited.
Discussion:
ITSM and ITIL:
Information Technology Service management or ITSM consists of a group a of people
who shares a common standard based on knowledge of high level and skills that area gained
from various organized education schemes. Whereas the Information Technology
Infrastructure Library is a type of framework that is used in organisations to implement the
ITSM. It is not a type of standard that is used in organizations to practice the service
management.
Aspects of ITSM at Target Corporation:
IT service management:
The company of Target Corporation utilized the ITSM and ITIL models in order to
focus on the delivery of its end to end services and technologies involved with it while
examining the processes and peoples who are associated with it (Lindholm & Ryabov, 2015).
The ITSM model that is encompassed within the retail sector includes multiple components
including IT governance, service delivery, technology and physical environment, and most
importantly service support. The components are further segmented into their individual areas
which are then assessed based on the ITSM model.
Governance and Risks:
Integration of Information Technology service management platform allowed the
company of Target Corporation to achieve the goals in governance while initiating

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management of services its assets and risks as per the requirements of the organisation of
Target corporation. The main goal of the organisation of Target Corporation is to reduce the
risk that is faced within its retailing process(van Vuuren, Kritzinger & Mueller, 2015). The
ITSM solution that is applied in the organisation helped the company of Target Corporation
to create a value through the entire retail market by optimizing its resources and enhancing its
decision-making process. This led the company to meet expectation within the governance
structure by positioning its employees successfully. With the implementation of ITSM,
governance and risks that are associated with it, are no longer burden for the organization.
The entire implementation process of ITSM in the organisation of Target Australia
held a series of steps and processes which are as follows:
Service Strategy:
In order to implement ITSM in retail industries, a series of service strategies of ITIL
needs to be followed which includes the following areas such as service portfolio
management, Financial management of the IT services, Demand management, Business
relationship management and strategy management for the IT services in the retail sectors.
The list of strategies that the retail sector of Target corporation undertook includes the
following-
1. Portfolio management strategy- The approaches that are used by the Target
corporation, to implement the strategy of portfolio management includes qualitative
analysis where the company used the scoring technique to rank its product in the
portfolio, strategic alignment approach where the company of Target Australia
emphasized on planning the overall business while giving special attention to the
resources that are related to the sales of the company. Another approach that is taken

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in this respect is by balancing the initiatives that are taken across multiple units in
business within the organisation of Target Corporation.
2. Financial management of the IT services- Finance is one of the important back
round for any successful business. The retail business of Target corporation makes
consistent profits by offering services and products in order to survive in the long run
(Knights & Tinker, 2016). The company of Target corporation initiated continuous
movements of funds within and outside the firm and finalized its organizational
structure to concentrate on the operation management which helps in providing an
overall growth and profitability in the organisation.
3. Demand management- Demand management plays an important part in
implementing ITSM in any retail industry. With the help of effective demand
management, retail industries avoid unwanted spending of capacity in service levels
that are caused by fluctuations in workload or in demand (Suryawan, 2017). The
company of target Australia deployed effective in store employees, is as to meet the
huge demand in their work force (Ehrenthal, Honhon & Van Woensel, 2014). The
company of Target Australia found a more granular solution in terms of visibility so
as to control the in-store personnel budgets with the help of tools like special event
staffing.
4. Business relationship management-For retail industry, relationship between
customers and business plays a vital role to enhance its brand image. For enhancing
the customer relationship management within the business of Target Australia, the
company implemented the CRM database that is mainly focused on the customers as
the integral part of the business process (Weed-Schertzer, 2019). Target Australia
with the help of its advanced CRM based database system collects information of

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their customer’s data from different websites and call centers and thus accelerates the
flow of information to suit the particular habitat of the customers.
Service Design:
The service design phase in the lifecycle of Information Technology service management,
helps in ensuring the development of cost-effective services which provides a certain level in
the quality of satisfaction to the customers and the stakeholders. With the help of proper
service design, retail organisations like Target corporation benefits in establishing solutions
so as to meet the requirements of the organisation (Forsgren & Humble, 2016). The phase of
service designing consists of some major management strategies which are as follows-
1. IT service continuity management-
For any retail industry ensuring the IT service continuity plan is the first and foremost
priority. To ensure effective operation in the retail sector, the organisation of Target
corporation, implemented effective inventory management services so as to facilitate the
supply of the retailer with correct quantity of goods so as to meet the demand in the market
position (Cater-Steel & Lepmets, 2014). The organisation implemented the use of a software
that helps them in determining the stores enabling them a better inventory management. The
organisation of Target Australia, considers contingency inventory in their supply chain so as
to backup the suppliers. This helps the retailers in the organisation to reduce the risk and to
ensure IT service continuity plan (Bakar, Yaacob & Udin, 2015).
2. Information security management:
Information security management refers to the set of activities that are taken within
organisation so as to relate the protection of information and information assets against
major security risks causing loss or misuse of data. The organisation of Target Australia

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is one of the most impacted organisation due to data security issues that were caused at its
human resource technology provider Page Up. Thus, for the organisation, ensuring data
security management, plays an important role. As a step forward in managing its
information, the organization of Target Australia implemented advanced data security
strategies in order to enable better decisions and support in designing technology so as to
protect the sensitive data that are stored within their database. The organisation of Target
Australia took a holistic approach to provide data protection involving security of data at
all points within their business network.
Service Operation:
The process of service operation refers to the management of IT services in a daily basis,
so as to ensure the value of the services and to confirm the design of the service operations
within an organisation. Like other processes like service strategy, service designing, the stage
of service operation also includes a series of processes including, event management,
problem management and incident management which are addressed as follows:
1. Problem management:
Among the various steps that are taken under the service operation process, problem
management is one of them. It is the cause of one or more incidents (Hübner, Holzapfel &
Kuhn, 2015). It is defined as the process of managing the lifecycle of all types of problem
that are faced within an organisation with respect to the IT services that it offers (Singh,
2014). At Target Australia, the biggest problem is with the supply chains which has grown up
more accurately expanding its effects in consumable goods and products (Vlietland & Van
Vliet, 2015). As a matter to mitigate this problem, Target implemented a number of external
distributors outside its business. The company has started using the whole sellers and the
outsourcing methods to increase its amount in distribution moving towards fast consumables.

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In this ay Target Australia initiated its problem management operation in the approach
towards developing an ITSM with the retail sector (Webb et al., 2014).
Apart from the operations like problem management, the other service operations also
include incident managements and event managements that organisations should also look up
for while developing proper ITSM within the organisation (Li et al., 2014).
Continual Service Improvement:
The last stage of ITSM implementation process includes the continuous monitoring of the
services that are delivered in business organisations so as to ensure that the implementation of
the management of services within the business is continued while delivering the desired
benefits to the business.
1. Deming cycle: As a part of continuous improvement in the quality of services
consisting of logical sequences within a business, the Deming cycle plays an
important role for improving and learning the models. The entire cycle of Deming
consists of processes including planning of the objectives, implementation of the plan
and collection of data based on the objectives, analyzing the results thus obtained and
lastly implementing changes based on the obtained results. As the majority pf the
organisation of Target Australia is focused on providing improved quality products to
its customers, hence it implemented the use of Deming Cycle within their quality
management process so as to improve the quality of the products in an improved and
multiple ways.
Service Delivery:
1. Capacity management:

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Capacity management is the process of resizing the business resources so as to
meet the present as well as the future needs of the organisation. Retail industries who
perform the capacity management needs to make sure that the services that are
required within the business meets at least minimum requirement of the IT resources.
As a part of capacity management, the organisation of Target Australia, implemented
the Xangati solution so as to manage the role in the virtual environment of the
organisation. Besides using this solution, the organization is also making use of
predictive analysis in order to enable the retail industry to track the journey of the
customers and the demand of the product. The brand managers at the organization
also made use of effects in test design so as to enable the customers to engage with
their brand.
ITSM and professional culture:
Managing the professional culture of the organisation, is as important than any other
goa that is meant to achieve in the implementation of ITSM in the industry. With the
application or introduction of ITSM or ITIL with business organization often leads to the
change in the process and the thinking of the people about their respective jobs (Nicho, Khan
& Rahman, 2017). This ultimately leads to the change or shift in the organizational culture.
Managing the professional culture of any organisation is similar to that of initiating change
management within several branches of a company (Amelec, 2015). The main issue that is
faced in this respect is mainly based on the understanding of IT service management and the
IT information library related to the project. Few obstacles that were faced by the
organisation of Target Australia so as implement ITSM within the organization includes lack
of proper executive supports to raise awareness on the efforts that were being made to
validate the importance of the organisation, obstacles while changing the people who are used

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to do work based on the old process, facing challenges even after completing the
implementation of the ITSM within their business (Fernie & Sparks, 2018).
ITSM in enhancing business proposition:
ITSM is the art of implementing, delivering and managing the IT services that are offered
in the business organisations so as to meet the needs of an organisation. Application of ITSM
within the business organisation, enhances the business proposition by ensuring that the
amount of people, processes or technology that are used are in place based on the value of the
organisation (Marrone et al., 2014). The application of ITSM improves the efficiency of
business proposition especially in the retail sectors so as to address the following benefits
including:
1. Improving the efficiency of the business process of the retail industry and to reduce
the operational costs of the retail sector.
2. Introducing self service efficiencies and to reduce the workloads within the
organizations; process.
3. Using a fit for purpose within the organization
4. Increasing the control and governance of the ITSM frameworks
5. Introducing better customer experience with respect to the services that are offered by
them (Zakaria et al., 2014).
6. Last but not the least to improve the standardization within the world wide business so
as to optimize the processes involved within the business process.
Apart from all these benefits, application of ITSM enhances business proposition while
improving the collaboration within the business functions of Target Australia. The entire
relation between ITSM and business organisations is mainly a two-way process. From the
implementation of ITSM not only business organizations benefit from the enterprise service

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management but it also gets an opportunity for further demonstrating IT with its business
through its skills and knowledge of service management enabling technologies to support the
service management of the business (Klingebiel & Joseph, 2016). Hence both ITSM and
business propositions goes hand in hand.
Conclusion:
As economic turmoil is driving considerable changes in the retail industry, hence it is
important that they should start investing on IT services. In this context it can be thus
concluded that for managing the retail sector for providing values to the customers with their
enhanced IT services, implementation of a proper ITSM is very much necessary. With the
help of ITSM, organisations thus can increase their proficiency by delivering value-based
services and products to their customers in the retail market.