Abstract
The context: the selection of a maximum value IT service portfolio is a major challenge to be faced by IT executives, during the Service Strategy phase of the IT service life cycle defined in ITIL. The problem: ITIL states that the value of an IT service should be estimated based on the improvement of customers’ outcomes brought by the service. It is hard to apply this approach due to difficulties to access data related to customers’ outcomes and to precisely isolate the influence of IT on the improvements of customers’ performance.
Abstract—The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices that are widely accepted for IT service management. Change management is a core ITIL process that oversees the handling of IT changes and ensures that all change requests are carefully prioritised and authorised, that business and technical impacts are understood, and that required resources are available. During this process, IT operations teams first need to understand the change requests that are generated by business and IT personnel. They must then develop and execute concrete IT change plans for each request. The increasingly large and complex IT environment (people, technology and processes) presents a number of challenges to the efficient and effective design of the ever higher volume of IT changes: Change requests can be ill-defined, company policies and best practices are not systematically captured and enforced, manually designing changes is time consuming and error-prone. To overcome these issues we propose in this paper an automated planning based approach to change design. We illustrate how change knowledge can be represented to encode best practices and how to refine high-level change requests into concrete plans. A prototypical implementation shows the feasibility of the approach and demon-strates the concept of a change catalogue that can be presented to business users.