Business Driven IT Management (BDIM)

The Business Driven IT Management (BDIM) research group focuses on developing a set of business driven decision support and automation tools to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of IT service delivery and service support.  BDIM tools reason over the objectives, the decisional criteria and the dependencies that link IT Operations and IT Service Management.

BDIM is a set of design principles and control systems that enable IT services to adapt to changes in business requirements, thereby achieving synchronization between the Business and IT functions.  Decisions on how resources, physical, human and financial, available to the IT function can best be utilized are complex decisions as business requirements frequently change and the IT function is expected to rapidly adapt to these changes.  The decision problem is made even more complex as, in an Adaptive Infrastructure, it is advantageous to share IT resources more broadly among many lines of business in order to better leverage IT investments and significantly increase Return on IT investment (RoIT).  In an Adaptive Infrastructure, strategic alignment between business and IT becomes the key driver for the resource assignment decision mechanisms that underpin the effective synchronization of Business and IT.  BDIM is based on modelling and resoning over the objectives, the decisional criteria and the dependencies that link IT operations, IT management and IT governance.  BDIM provides a set of tools that enables IT managers to model their business objectives; and use those objectives to support the IT decision making process by analyzing and determining the optimal solution to ensure IT strategic alignment.

BDIM has been used in two contexts:

• SLA driven resource scheduling:
  BDIM team contribution was to help a Fabric Provider better manage its infrastructure.  Our optimization technology has been used to solve the problem of congestion in the data center and aligning allocation decisions with a utility provider's business objectives.  Examples of business objectives could be to maximize a utility provider's profit, to maximize customer satisfaction or to maximize customer retention.
   

• ITSM Prioritization:
  Decision support capability focusing on prioritization decisions for ITIL Management and Service Level Management processes.  This work is being transferred to HP Software as part of HP Openview Decision Center product.
   

• Decision support tool for change management process:
  The goal for this research thread is to provide the change manager and the secondary stakeholders (change advisory board - CAB, IT operations, release manager) with improved visibility on all phases of the change management in order to enable better informed decision making and improve the accuracy of estimates of impact, urgency and effort for given requests for changes.
   

• Automated Change Planning and Scheduling:
  In the change planning phase, we help the change builder by automating the generation of change plans to respond to incoming RFC's.  In the scheduling phase, we automatically schedule planned changes given a set of constraints (on precedence, time, change agent type and configuration item type) while optimizing a set of objectives such as minimizing impact, minimizing cost, or minimizing expected time to completion of changes.  We discuss a software prototype realizing the following capabilities:

• Create a knowledge base for changes that include the notions of change templates, change actions and policies.

• Provide management tools for the knowledge base (browse, add, modify templates, actions, policies).

• Automate the generation of change plans from the knowledge base and up-to-date CMBD

• Assist template creation by reasoning on past changes (case base reasoning).

• Optimally schedule change activities and assign them to change agents (human resources).

Contact:
Abdel  Boulmakoul (abdel.boulmakoul@hp.com)