It Operating Models In Practice And Research: An Analysis Of The State Of Knowledge

An IT operating model is a combination oforganizational structure and processes that comprehensively covers the IT department. It spans the whole IT lifecycle from IT strategy, architecture, demand and supply management, project management, infrastructure to support services such as accounting andHR. In essence, it is how the IT organization is set up to serve its users, the business. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT executives are facing constant pressure to optimize their IT operating model to fit the ever changing business models of their users. The guidance information systems (IS) research provides on this issue is scarce. The IS literature contains little specific advice on how organizations should develop and adapt IT operating models. While the literature has extensive studies on components of IToperating models, such as enterprise architecture, research on IT operating models as a whole is surprisingly sparse. This paper analyzes the available academic and practitioner literature on IT operating models and identifies areas for future research. It specifically identifies research on internal alignment within an IT department ( inward alignment ) as an area of urgent need

Predictive analysis of incidents based on software deployments

A high number of information technology organizations have several problems during and after deploying their services, this alongside with the high number of services that they provide daily, it makes Incident Management (IM) process quite demanding. An effective IM system needs to enable decision-makers to detect problems easily. Otherwise, the organizations can face unscheduled system downtime and/or unplanned costs. This study demonstrates that is possible to introduce a predictive process that may lead to an improvement of the response time to incidents and to the reduction of the number of incidents created by deployments. By predicting these problems, the decision-makers can better allocate resources and mitigate costs. Therefore, this research aims to investigate if machine learning algorithms can help to predict the number of incidents of a certain deployment. The results showed with some security, that it is possible to predict, if a certain deployment will have or not an incident in the future.Um número elevado de organizações de tecnologias de informação têm um grande número de problemas no momento e após lançarem os seus serviços, se juntarmos a isto o número elevado de serviços que estas organizações prestam diariamente, dificulta bastante o processo de Incident Management (IM). Um sistema de IM eficaz deve permitir aos decisores de negócio detetar facilmente estes problemas, caso contrário, as organizações podem ter de enfrentar imprevistos nos seus serviços (custos ou falhas). Esta tese irá demonstrar que é possível introduzir um processo de previsão que poderá levar a um melhoramento do tempo de resposta aos incidentes, assim como uma redução dos mesmo. Prevendo estes problemas estes podem alocar melhor os recursos assim como mitigar os incidentes. Como tal, esta tese irá analisar como prever esses incidentes, analisando os deployments feitos nos últimos anos e relacionando-os usando algoritmos de machine learning para prever os incidentes. Os resultados mostraram que é possível prever com confiança se um determinado deploymente vai ou não ter incidentes

DevOps practices in incident management process

This research aims to investigate how DevOps culture can be applied in the incident management process to improve it. Given the exploratory approach of the research, it was performed a case study. For this case study an application management team was studied where a sample of 10 persons were interviewed. This team solves incidents and provides the necessary support to the users in their daily business tasks using DevOps practices. During this case study three data collection methods were used: semi structured interviews, document analysis and observation. This research provides novel findings about a possible relation between DevOps practices and incident management phases as well as on “why” and “how” can these practices help incident management. The results are supported by metrics, like time between releases, total of over delivered incidents solutions and releases per month, to justify how this team’s performance have increased after the implementation of DevOps practices. The novelty of the findings brings advantages for academics, and due to the exploratory nature of this research, it extends the body of knowledge. It also provides contributions for practitioners, by showing how these practices can be applied and the result of the implementation of these practices. Directions of future work are also presented.O objetivo desta pesquisa é investigar como a cultura DevOps pode ser aplicada ao processo de gestão de incidentes e como pode melhorá-lo. Dada a abordagem exploratória para esta pesquisa, foi feito um caso de estudo. O objeto de estudo para esta pesquisa, foi uma equipa de gestão aplicacional em gestão de incidentes, onde um conjunto de 10 pessoas foi entrevistado. Esta equipa resolve incidentes e fornece o suporte necessário aos utilizadores de negócio, nas suas tarefas do dia a dia, utilizando práticas DevOps. Durante a elaboração deste caso de estudo, foi feita a triangulação de três métodos de recolha de dados: entrevistas semiestruturadas, análise documental e observação. Esta pesquisa fornece novas conclusões sobre uma possível relação entre práticas de DevOps e as fases do processo de gestão de incidentes, tal como o “porquê” e o “como” estas práticas podem ajudar o processo de gestão de incidentes. São apresentados resultados, como o tempo entre entregas, total de soluções de incidentes entregues a mais do que estava planeado e o número de entregas por mês, de forma a justificar como existiu uma melhoria de desempenho desta equipa após a implementação destas práticas. As conclusões que são apresentadas nesta pesquisa trazem vantagens tanto para académicos devido à natureza exploratória deste estudo que estende o corpo de conhecimento científico. E também para profissionais, por demonstrar como aplicar estas práticas e os seus resultados após implementação. Direções para trabalho futuro são também apresentadas

Mineração de Processos no Gerenciamento de Incidentes : uma revisão sistemática da literatura

Um incidente, conforme o framework de governança ITIL 4, é uma falha inesperada ou uma piora na performance de algum produto. Uma das disciplinas do ITIL 4 é a gestão de incidentes, responsável por resolvê-los num tempo acordado entre os participantes do processo e de maneira aceitável. Mineração de processos é uma técnica capaz de capturar logs de execução de processos e identificar oportunidades de melhorias, como redução de tempo e custos. Entretanto, isso nem sempre é uma tarefa trivial, sendo que determi nados fatores podem comprometer uma mineração efetiva. A mineração de processos de negócio pode ser usada para apontar pontos de gargalo no gerenciamento dos incidentes, verificar quais tipos de incidentes estão levando mais tempo para serem resolvidos, quais razões levam tais incidentes a levarem mais tempo e também pode indicar possibilidades de automação de tarefas. O objetivo deste estudo é fazer uma revisão sistemática da li teratura sobre a integração do gerenciamento de incidentes e mineração de processos de negócio a fim de investigar o estado da arte sobre estes tópicos e avaliar quão efetiva é a combinação destes.An incident, according to the ITIL 4 governance framework, is an unexpected failure or deterioration in the performance of some product. One of the disciplines of ITIL 4 is the incident management, responsible for resolving them within a time agreed between the process participants and in an acceptable manner. Business process mining is a technique capable of capturing process execution logs and identifying opportunities for improve ment, such as time and cost reduction. However, this is not always an easy task, as certain factors can compromise effective mining. Business process mining can be used to find bottlenecks on incident management, check which types of incidents are taking longer to be resolved, which reasons lead such incidents to take longer, and can also indicate pos sibilities for task automation. The aim of this work is to do a systematic literature review on the integration of incident management and business process mining in order to inves tigate the state of research on these topics and assess how effective is the combination of these

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-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