Business-driven IT management

My thesis on business-driven IT management is online at the University of Ferrara.

Here's the abstract:

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.

The convergence of IT and business (from Forbes.com)

At a roundtable hosted by HP Wednesday, executives from Microsoft, VMware and other major technology companies agreed on the big picture--that virtualization is soon going to be ubiquitous. Read the rest of the post on Forbes. It's obviously not all about virtualization...

DSOM proceedings, Springer and Liquidpub

Springer asks me to put a link to the DSOM proceedings on my web page (which I had already done), but here is a nice picture of it.

This all made me think of Liquidpub. Liquidpub is a collaborative project sponsored by the European Commission and coordinated by the University of Trento. Liquidpub aims at changing the whole academic publishing industry, and quite cleverly Springer is a partner to it (if you can't beat them, eat them). I'm involved in Liquidpub through my connection with Fabio Casati's group at Trento, and quite excited to be part of it. One of the use cases we're working on is that of liquid journals, that will allow anyone to publish first, and gain acceptance later; embed and value liquid contributions, including contributions other than standard academic papers (blog entries, etc...). Quite promising and a lot of fun.

It's BDIM time again

The fifth edition of BDIM - the IEEE/IFIP Business-driven IT Management workshop will be held in Osaka, Japan on April 19, 2010 - co-located with NOMS 2010.



And this year we'll be on twitter too.

DSOM '09 proceedings

The proceedings of DSOM '09 are now available, published by Springer in LNCS. At some point I'll post about the workshop too, which was quite good, definitely better than the last few previous editions.

Splunk

Splunk is the subject of one of the invited talks at CHIMIT '09. Splunks is an IT search company. Their solution indexes various sources of data in IT, associates rules to them and provides analytics and dashboarding on top of them. There was no demo, so I'm trying to find out what I can from the website, but seems to me that Splunk is to IT what Autonomy is to the enterprise.

Curiously, all the questions that the keynote got were about privacy concerns - maybe not surprising, given that the audience is mostly made up of SysAdmins.

CHIMIT '09 in Baltimore

I'm attending CHIMIT '09, (almost) co-located with LISA '09 in Baltimore. Interesting agenda at the intersection between HCI and system administration. HCI is definitely not in my background, though it's an interest of mine, because systems should be designed from the user interface in. This is the third edition of CHIMIT, and it started a few years ago when researchers started to get together who had carried out field studies to look in depth at how system administrators do their job.