The National Systems for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) is a large, complex, information technology (IT) enterprise offering 300 geospatial information services supported by approximately 650 servers and 10 petabytes of storage of critical geospatial information. The NSG supplies geospatial information to 25 military commands and intelligence community agencies. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) established an enterprise service center (ESC) in May 2006 to centrally manage and provide NGA stakeholders with a single access point to NSG IT services.

Recent investments to improve NGA ESC effectiveness include outsourcing IT service with defined service-level agreements, developing and implementing IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-based processes with process-driven metrics, and integrating process-enhancing technology tools. NGA's intent in making these investments was to improve service quality, reduce costs, and improve response time.

The problem investigated was that the NSG ESC workforce was not achieving its overall performance and effectiveness goals in terms of incident resolution rate. Based on findings from this investigation, the author determined how workforce competency affects service effectiveness. In this investigation, competency includes an individual's skills; experiences; and knowledge of processes, procedures, and tools. Tools include software that enables an individual to assign, monitor, and close an incident and, in turn, facilitates system administration actions, enterprise performance monitoring, and incident resolution trend analysis.

The author conducted a case study of the NGA ESC to obtain a holistic understanding of ESC workforce competencies as applied to the incident management process. The understanding of workforce competency was accomplished through interviews, archival data review, and observations.

The results of this study indicate that an individual's competence can directly affect the individual's service support effectiveness. The author concluded that in a structured, closely monitored, and well-managed ESC, increasing IT service management (ITSM) worker competence increased incident management service effectiveness. The results of this research also supported the position of the Office of Government Commerce, an international standards organization, that day-to-day operational performance of information management processes must be monitored, controlled, and managed. The research also showed that regardless of ESC worker competence in ITSM, a poorly managed ESC limits service effectiveness.