ChangeAdvisor: A Solution to Support Alignment of IT Change Design with Business Objectives/Constraints

Change planning represents a key element for the operation and management of Information Technology infrastructures and services. Its scope ranges from the high level design of a change request to the generation, either manually or automatically, of detailed plans that, if executed, will perform the requested changes (e.g., modification of network device settings and deployment of new services). A fundamental problem is that, although correct, such detailed plans may not be necessarily aligned with the requirements defined in the business level (e.g., minimization of the downtime of a given service). To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a solution for the alignment of change plans with business objectives/constraints. The solution is analyzed experimentally through a prototypical implementation of a decision support system called CHANGEADVISOR, which helps operators to understand the trade-offs between alternative change designs.