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Research opportunities |
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Information technology has become so essential that it would be impossible for most companies to function (let alone succeed) without it. Demands that business-critical systems run at peak performance, enable strategic changes and drive revenue growth are escalating. At the same time, CEOs want to reduce IT costs.
The result is an increasing gap between business demands and IT’s ability to keep pace. IT organizations are faced with the challenge of controlling costs while increasing their value to the business.
Despite these pressures, technologies to measure the business impact of IT decisions are largely lacking. When problems arise, the urgency and impact are typically judged from an IT point of view, rather than evaluating the true business cost -- impact on the bottom line, for example, or damage to the company's reputation -- of not dealing with a problem in a timely fashion.
Managing IT from a business perspective has the potential to improve IT service quality, decrease operating costs and enhance customer satisfaction
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Our approach |
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We believe it is essential to consider business objectives in decisions about IT management. Our work builds on IT service management best practices such as the IT Information Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT). Where possible, we are integrating our solutions with existing tools and technologies for IT services delivery and support. |
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Research focus |
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We are developing a set of business-driven decision support and automation technologies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of IT service delivery and support. |
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Current work |
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Research areas include:
- decision support -- tools to help IT managers improve the accuracy of business impact, risk, urgency and effort for IT change requests.
- assisted design for IT changes -- automating change- plan creation.
- business-driven change scheduling -- automatically schedules planned changes given a set of constraints (i.e., urgency, type of change, time required to make the change) while minimizing impact to users, reducing costs or meeting other business objectives
Our activities include:
- modeling links between IT metrics and business objectives
- modeling the relationship between IT service management processes and business objectives
- service and resource modeling
- risk and business impact analysis
- assessing and improving the performance of IT support
- applying optimization and machine-learning techniques to the decision-making process
We work closely with both HP Software and HP Services, as well as with customers and universities.
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Technical contributions |
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Our service-level, agreement-driven resource scheduling work was used during the SE3D animation showcase -- an experiment in utility computing in which animators shared access to computing resources to address data center congestion and align resource-allocation decisions with business objectives.
Our IT service management prioritization research -- designed to provide decision support based on business priorities for IT incident management and service-level management -- contributed to HP's Service Desk product.
In addition, we contribute to HP Software products such as the DecisionCenter, which lets IT optimize staff resources against service-levels, business impact and cost. We recently completed a customer trial in this area.
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Services |
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Printable version
