11 research outputs found

    SYMIAN: A Simulation Tool for the Optimization of the IT Incident Management Process

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    CLOUD SERVICE REVENUE MANAGEMENT

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    Successful Internet service offerings can only thrive if customers are satisfied with service performance. While large service providers can usually cope with fluctuations of customer visits retaining acceptable Quality of Service, small and medium-sizes enterprises face a big challenge due to limited resources in the IT infrastructure. Popular services, such as justin.tv and SmugMug, rely on external resources provided by cloud computing providers in order to satisfy their customers demands at all times. The paradigm of cloud computing refers to the delivery model of computing services as a utility in a pay-as-you-go manner. In this paper, we provide and computationally evaluate decision models and policies that can help cloud computing providers increase their revenue under the realistic assumption of scarce resources and under both informational certainty and uncertainty of customers? resource requirement predictions. Our results show that in both cases under certainty and under uncertainty applying the dynamic pricing policy significantly increases revenue while using the client classification policy substantially reduces revenue. We also show that, for all policies, the presence of uncertainty causes losses in revenue; when the client classification policy is applied, losses can even amount to more than 8%

    Scientific progress of design research artefacts

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    Many existing IT applications exhibit strongly varying demand patterns for resources. Accommodating an ever increasing and highly fluctuating demand requires continuous availability of sufficient resources. To achieve this state at reasonably costs, a high degree of flexibility with respect to the given IT infrastructure is necessary. Facing this challenge the idea of Cloud computing has been gaining interest. In so-called Clouds resources such as CPU, storage and bandwidth can be bundled into a single services, which are offered to Cloud users. These services can be accessed in oblivion of the underlying IT infrastructure. This way Cloud Computing facilitates the introduction of new products and services without large investments in the IT infrastructure. Cloud Computing is a promising approach with a high impact on business models. One aspect of business models is clearly the revenue model, which defines how prices should be set to achieve predefined revenue level. The decision about accepting or denying requests has a high impact on the revenue of the provider. In this paper we analyze two approaches that support the cloud provider in its decision. We show that predefined policies allow increasing revenue compared to widely used technical models such as first-come-first-serve

    Management of Cloud Infastructures: Policy-Based Revenue Optimization

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    Competition on global markets forces many enterprises to make use of new applications, reduce process times and at the same time cut the costs of their IT-infrastructure. To achieve this, it is necessary to maintain a high degree of flexibility with respect to the IT-infrastructure. Facing this challenge the idea of Cloud computing has been gaining interest lately. Cloud services can be accessed on demand without knowledge of the underlying infrastructure and have already succeeded in helping companies deploy products faster. Using Cloud services the New York Times managed to convert scanned images containing 11 million articles into PDF within 24 hours at a cost of merely 240 US-$. However Cloud providers will only offer their services, if they can realize sufficient benefit. To achieve this, the efficiency of Cloud infrastructure management must be increased. To this end we propose the use of concepts from revenue management and further enhancements

    Business-driven IT Management

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    Business-driven IT management (BDIM) aims at ensuring successful alignment of business and IT through thorough understanding of the impact of IT on business results, and vice versa. In this dissertation, we review the state of the art of BDIM research and we position our intended contribution within the BDIM research space along the dimensions of decision support (as opposed of automation) and its application to IT service management processes. Within these research dimensions, we advance the state of the art by 1) contributing a decision theoretical framework for BDIM and 2) presenting two novel BDIM solutions in the IT service management space. First we present a simpler BDIM solution for prioritizing incidents, which can be used as a template for creating BDIM solutions in other IT service management processes. Then, we present a more comprehensive solution for optimizing the business-related performance of an IT support organization in dealing with incidents. Our decision theoretical framework and models for BDIM bring the concepts of business impact and risk to the fore, and are able to cope with both monetizable and intangible aspects of business impact. We start from a constructive and quantitative re-definition of some terms that are widely used in IT service management but for which was never given a rigorous decision: business impact, cost, benefit, risk and urgency. On top of that, we build a coherent methodology for linking IT-level metrics with business level metrics and make progress toward solving the business-IT alignment problem. Our methodology uses a constructive and quantitative definition of alignment with business objectives, taken as the likelihood – to the best of one’s knowledge – that such objectives will be met. That is used as the basis for building an engine for business impact calculation that is in fact an alignment computation engine. We show a sample BDIM solution for incident prioritization that is built using the decision theoretical framework, the methodology and the tools developed. We show how the sample BDIM solution could be used as a blueprint to build BDIM solutions for decision support in other IT service management processes, such as change management for example. However, the full power of BDIM can be best understood by studying the second fully fledged BDIM application that we present in this thesis. While incident management is used as a scenario for this second application as well, the main contribution that it brings about is really to provide a solution for business-driven organizational redesign to optimize the performance of an IT support organization. The solution is quite rich, and features components that orchestrate together advanced techniques in visualization, simulation, data mining and operations research. We show that the techniques we use - in particular the simulation of an IT organization enacting the incident management process – bring considerable benefits both when the performance is measured in terms of traditional IT metrics (mean time to resolution of incidents), and even more so when business impact metrics are brought into the picture, thereby providing a justification for investing time and effort in creating BDIM solutions. In terms of impact, the work presented in this thesis produced about twenty conference and journal publications, and resulted so far in three patent applications. Moreover this work has greatly influenced the design and implementation of Business Impact Optimization module of HP DecisionCenterℱ: a leading commercial software product for IT optimization, whose core has been re-designed to work as described here

    Business-driven IT Management

    Get PDF
    Business-driven IT management (BDIM) aims at ensuring successful alignment of business and IT through thorough understanding of the impact of IT on business results, and vice versa. In this dissertation, we review the state of the art of BDIM research and we position our intended contribution within the BDIM research space along the dimensions of decision support (as opposed of automation) and its application to IT service management processes. Within these research dimensions, we advance the state of the art by 1) contributing a decision theoretical framework for BDIM and 2) presenting two novel BDIM solutions in the IT service management space. First we present a simpler BDIM solution for prioritizing incidents, which can be used as a template for creating BDIM solutions in other IT service management processes. Then, we present a more comprehensive solution for optimizing the business-related performance of an IT support organization in dealing with incidents. Our decision theoretical framework and models for BDIM bring the concepts of business impact and risk to the fore, and are able to cope with both monetizable and intangible aspects of business impact. We start from a constructive and quantitative re-definition of some terms that are widely used in IT service management but for which was never given a rigorous decision: business impact, cost, benefit, risk and urgency. On top of that, we build a coherent methodology for linking IT-level metrics with business level metrics and make progress toward solving the business-IT alignment problem. Our methodology uses a constructive and quantitative definition of alignment with business objectives, taken as the likelihood – to the best of one’s knowledge – that such objectives will be met. That is used as the basis for building an engine for business impact calculation that is in fact an alignment computation engine. We show a sample BDIM solution for incident prioritization that is built using the decision theoretical framework, the methodology and the tools developed. We show how the sample BDIM solution could be used as a blueprint to build BDIM solutions for decision support in other IT service management processes, such as change management for example. However, the full power of BDIM can be best understood by studying the second fully fledged BDIM application that we present in this thesis. While incident management is used as a scenario for this second application as well, the main contribution that it brings about is really to provide a solution for business-driven organizational redesign to optimize the performance of an IT support organization. The solution is quite rich, and features components that orchestrate together advanced techniques in visualization, simulation, data mining and operations research. We show that the techniques we use - in particular the simulation of an IT organization enacting the incident management process – bring considerable benefits both when the performance is measured in terms of traditional IT metrics (mean time to resolution of incidents), and even more so when business impact metrics are brought into the picture, thereby providing a justification for investing time and effort in creating BDIM solutions. In terms of impact, the work presented in this thesis produced about twenty conference and journal publications, and resulted so far in three patent applications. Moreover this work has greatly influenced the design and implementation of Business Impact Optimization module of HP DecisionCenterℱ: a leading commercial software product for IT optimization, whose core has been re-designed to work as described here

    Tagungsband zum Doctoral Consortium der WI 2009

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    Bereits seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre wird jungen Wissenschaftlern im Vorfeld der Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik ein Doctoral Consortium als unterstĂŒtzendes Forum angeboten. Diese Einrichtung wurde auch zur grĂ¶ĂŸten internationalen Konferenz der Wirtschaftsinformatik, der WI 2009 in Wien fortgefĂŒhrt. Dieser Band fasst die zum Vortrag ausgewĂ€hlten BeitrĂ€ge zusammen. Table of Contents: Tina Balke, On the Enforcement of Institutions for Reducing Uncertainty in Utility Computing Computational Economies 
1; Christian Czarnecki, Gestaltung von Customer Relationship Management ĂŒber die Grenzen von Telekommunikationsunternehmen hinweg 
11; Christoph Danne, Assessing the cost of assortment complexity in consumer goods supply chains by reconfiguration of inventory and production planning parameters in response to assortment changes 
 24; JosĂ© M. GonzĂĄlez V., Gestaltung nachhaltiger IT-Landschaften in der Energiewirtschaft mit Hilfe von Referenzmodellen 
 35; Christoph Habla, Eine Grobterminierungskomponente zur funktionalen Erweiterung von Manufacturing Execution Systems 
 45; Frank Hogrebe, Integriertes Produkt- und Prozessmodell fĂŒr die öffentliche Verwaltung 
 55; Sebastian Hudert, A protocol-generic infrastructure for electronic SLA negotiations in the Internet of Services 
 65; Bernd Jahn, Der Manager als Prosumer seines UnterstĂŒtzungssystems - Ein Ansatz zum Entwurf Konfigurierbarer ManagementunterstĂŒtzungssysteme 
 75; Florian Johannsen, Konzeption und Evaluation eines Ansatzes zur Methodenintegration im QualitĂ€tsmanagement 
 85; Karin Kronawitter, IT-Outsourcing in banking industry - stage of maturity model as strategic approach 
 95; Barbara Krumay, Der Einuss von Online Kundenservice-Angeboten auf KundenloyalitĂ€t 
 105; Tyge Kummer, Kulturelle Einflussfaktoren der Akzeptanz ambienter Systeme zur Vermeidung von Medikationsfehlern in KrankenhĂ€usern 
 115; Stefan König, Elektronische Verhandlungen im Internet-of-Services unter BerĂŒcksichtigung von Reputationsinformationen 
 125; Tim PĂŒschel, Intelligentes Ressourcenmanagement fĂŒr Clouds - Konzept und Implementierung eines Entscheidungsmodells 
 135; Olaf Reinhold, Auswirkungen auf die Gestaltung von CRM-Anwendungssystemen durch Kooperation von Unternehmen entlang von Wertschöpfungsketten und in Unternehmensnetzwerken 
 144; Markus Ruch, Kundenindividuelle Steuerung von Transaktionsrisiken im E-Commerce 
 155; Frank Schlosser, Die Bedeutung von operativem Business/IT-Alignment fĂŒr nachhaltigen Unternehmenserfolg - Ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk und Richtlinien fĂŒr die Praxis 
 168; Christian Schultewolter, Konzeptuelle Modellierung fĂŒr modellgetriebene Decision Support Systeme 
 178; Gudrun SchĂŒtz, Preisstrategien von InternethĂ€ndlern und deren technische Umsetzung 
 188; Sarah Voltz, Prognose und Förderung des Verordnungsverhaltens von Ärzten in Netzwerkstrukturen 
 198; -- Since the early 1990es, young researchers participate in the doctoral consortium series, co-located with the Wirtschaftsinformatik conference. This volume contains the selected papers of 20 PhD candidates of the 2009 doctoral consortium in Vienna.Wirtschaftsinformatik,Wirtschaftsinformatikstudium

    Tagungsband zum Doctoral Consortium der WI 2009

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