Palvelun saatavuuden varmistaminen monitoimittajaympäristössä

Yhä useampi yritys on siirtymässä homogeenisestä keskitetysti toimitetusta siilomaisten järjestelmien arkkitehtuurista palvelupohjaiseen (SOA, Service Oriented Architecture) palveluna hankittuun arkkitehtuuriin. Palvelut ovat hajautettuina useille eri toimittajille, jotka yhteistyössä monitoimittajaympäristössä tuottavat asiakasyritykselle heidän tarvitsemansa IT-palvelut. Homogeenisessä arkkitehtuurissa palvelun toimitusketjun häiriöiden paikallistaminen on yksinkertaista. Toipumis- ja häiriönhallinnan prosessit ovat yleisesti yhden käyttöpalvelutoimittajan koordinoitavissa. Monitoimittajaympäristössä toipumis- ja häiriönhallinnan prosessit ovat hajautettu eri toimijoille ja yrityksen oma käyttöpalvelutoimittaja koordinoi ainoastaan yrityksen omistamia räätälöityjä järjestelmiä sekä palveluita. Koska monitoimittajaympäristö on hajautettu eri toimijoiden hallinnoitavaksi, on häiriötilanteiden selvittäminen haastavampaa kuin homogeenisessä arkkitehtuurissa. Tässä tutkielmassa selvitetään kirjallisuuskatsauksen sekä tapaustutkimuksen kautta eri vaihtoehtoja monitoimittajaympäristön häiriöiden paikallistamiseen, korjaamiseen ja ennakointiin. Sekä tutkitaan erään yrityksen olemassa olevaa monitoimittajaympäristöä ja tämän häiriönhallinnan ratkaisua. Tutkielman tavoitteena oli selvittää millaisella integraatioarkkitehtuurilla voidaan valvoa ja ennakoida palvelun saatavuuteen vaikuttavia häiriöitä. Tutkielman lopputuloksen tarkoituksena ei ole vähentää esiintyvien häiriöiden määrää vaan varmistaa palvelun saatavuus loppukäyttäjille ja näin tukea liiketoimintaa

Business-driven IT Management

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 DecisionCenter™: a leading commercial software product for IT optimization, whose core has been re-designed to work as described here

Design of a methodological proposal for the optimization of incident and requirement management processes

Un proceso de gestión de incidentes y requerimientos debe tener un flujo de trabajo y tiempos de respuestas óptimos con el objetivo de garantizar la satisfacción de las necesidades de los usuarios. Por lo anterior es necesario contar, entre otras, con herramientas de modelado y simulación de procesos y herramientas de análisis de datos y de registro y seguimiento de solicitudes que permitan mostrar la gestión realizada, los resultados obtenidos e identificar puntos de control y aspectos a mejorar. A través del modelado de un proceso de gestión de incidentes y requerimientos, la identificación de las principales variables, entre las que se encontraron: el tipo de solicitud, el personal que realiza el soporte, los usuarios, las políticas de operación y el tiempo de respuesta, se simuló el proceso actual de gestión de incidencias y requerimientos. Con esta simulación se evidenció un tiempo promedio de respuesta de 6,62 días, en un proceso cuyo recurso más utilizado fue el ingeniero de soporte nivel 1 y ejecutado a través de 34 actividades. Analizados estos tiempos y cada una de las actividades actuales, se estableció una propuesta metodológica para el proceso optimizado basada principalmente en suprimir y reorganizar actividades (solo 31 actividades), generando un valor agregado al proceso que continuará ejecutando actividades cotidianas y básicas, como el registro, seguimiento y atención de las solicitudes de una nueva forma y con un mejor tiempo de respuesta, calculado en 5,6 días. Así mismo, se definieron nuevas políticas de operación e indicadores que redundarán en la satisfacción de las necesidades de los usuariosAn incident and requirements management process must have an optimal workflow and response times in order to guarantee the satisfaction of user needs, for this it is necessary to have, among others, modeling and simulation tools. processes, data analysis tools and the registration and follow-up of requests, which allow showing the management carried out, the results obtained and identifying control points and aspects to improve. Through the modeling of an incident and requirements management process, the identification of the main variables, among which were: the type of request, the support personnel, the users, the operating policies and the time of In response, the current incident and requirements management process was simulated, with this simulation an average response time of 6.62 days was evidenced, with a process whose most used resource was the level 1 support engineer and executed through 34 activities. After analyzing these times and each of the current activities, a methodological proposal was established for the optimized process based mainly on suppressing and reorganizing activities, (only 31 activities) generating added value to the process, which will continue executing daily and basic activities such as registration , follow-up and attention of requests in a new way and at the same time with a better response time, calculated in 5.6 days, likewise, new operating policies and indicators were defined, all of the above will result in the satisfaction of needs of the usersMagíster en Ingeniería de ProcesosMaestrí

Business-driven IT Management

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 DecisionCenter™: a leading commercial software product for IT optimization, whose core has been re-designed to work as described here

Business-impact analysis and simulation of critical incidents in IT service management

Service disruptions can have a considerable impact on business operations of IT support organizations, thus calling for the implementation of efficient incident management and service restoration processes. The evaluation and improvement of incident management strategies currently in place, in order to minimize the business-impact of major service disruptions, is a very arduous task which goes beyond the optimization with respect to IT-level metrics. This paper presents HANNIBAL, a decision support tool for the business impact analysis and improvement of the incident management process. HANNIBAL evaluates possible strategies for an IT support organization to deal with major service disruptions. HANNIBAL then selects the strategy with the best alignment to the business objectives. Experimental results collected from the HANNIBAL application to a realistic case study show that business impact-driven optimization outperforms traditional performance-driven optimization

Análisis y estudio sobre el gobierno y gestión de los servicios de TI en el mercado español

Este proyecto es un informe completo sobre la investigación realizada con el objeto de conocer cuál es la situación en la investigación, difusión del conocimiento, e implantación en las organizaciones que operan en España, con respecto a diferentes protocolos, buenas prácticas y normativas relacionadas con Gobierno y Gestión de Servicios TI (GyGS TI). Para la mejor visualización y comprensión de este documento se ha dejado en el mismo formato en el que se entregará a los participantes en los cuestionarios, a los socios de itSMF, y a otro amplio grupo de personas que han mostrado interés en este Observatorio. De manera que, en el anexo, encontrarán el documento “An{lisis y Estudio sobre el Gobierno y Gestión de los Servicios TI en el Mercado Español” en su formato original. Este Observatorio ha sido realizado durante los años 2008 y 2010, el cual analiza la situación pasada sobre el Gobierno y Gestión de los Servicios de TI (GyGSTI) entre las empresas que operan en España, este análisis se realiza a través de los resultados del cuestionario realizado en 2008, y prepara un segundo cuestionario para la conocer la situación en el 2010. Al mismo tiempo, realiza un estudio sobre el conocimiento existente en torno al Gobierno y Gestión de Servicios TI, a través de estudiar los libros más representativos sobre GyGS TI, las publicaciones académicas de investigación de GyGS, las principales empresas de análisis TI, y la situación sobre la difusión en el mercado español sobre GyGS TI a través de las revistas especializadas. Igualmente, el estudio ofrecerá una visión de la implantación de GyGS TI para que las empresas de cualquier tamaño puedan tener acceso, y realizar una comparativa (benchmarking) sobre su estado frente a sus iguales. Para finalmente ofrecer una visión de la evolución temporal del 2008 al 2010 y unas tendencias futuras. El objetivo es, entonces, analizar el estado y la implantación del GyGS TI entre las empresas que operan en España, e igualmente analizar la creación y difusión del conocimiento sobre esta misma área. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________This project is a comprehensive report on the investigation in order to know what the situation in the research, knowledge dissemination, and implementation in organizations operating in Spain, with respect to different protocols, best practices and regulations related to IT Governance and Service Management (IT G&SM). For best viewing and understanding the final document is left in the same format as that given to participants in the questionnaires, itSMF members, and another large group of people who have shown interest in this Observatory. So, in the Annex, will find the “Analysis and Study on the IT Government and Service Management in the Spanish Market” in its original format. This final document is the result of the Observatory carried out during the years 2008 and 2010, which analyzes the past situation on the Governance and Service Management of IT Services (IT G&SM) between companies operating in Spain, this analysis is performed through the results the survey conducted in 2008, and prepares a second questionnaire to ascertain the situation in 2010. At the same time, it is also carried out a study on the existing knowledge about IT Government and IT Service Management, by studying the most representative books on these fields, publications academic research, major IT analyst firms, and the situation on the IT GSM Spanish market through specialized magazines. As well as, the study will provide for companies of any size an overview of the implementation of IT GSM Spanish implantation, thus these companies will be able to benchmark theirselves with their peers. Finally, this document gives an overview of the temporal evolution from 2008 to 2010 and some future trends. The aim is, then, to analyze the status and implementation of IT GSM among companies operating in Spain, and also to discuss about the creation and dissemination of knowledge on this same area.Ingeniería de Telecomunicació