Decision Support for Service Transition Management: Enforce Service Transition Management and Change Scheduling by Performing Risk Impact Analysis

In IT Service Delivery, alignment of service infrastructures to continuously changing business requirements is a primary cost driver, all the more as most severe service disruptions can be attributed to poor change impact and risk assessment. In nowadays service-oriented business environments, services are shared amongst multiple higher-level or composite services, while the highest composition level finally forms the business processes. Changing services or service definitions in such an environment includes exceptionally high risk and complexity, as various business processes might depend on a service. In this paper we propose a model for analyzing the business impact of operational risks resulting from change related service downtimes of uncertain duration, as the impact on dependent, running or expected business processes is analyzed and transferred into financial losses. The proposed solution automatically considers the dependency chain up to the decomposition mapping of affected business processes. Based on the analytical model, we derive decision models in terms of deterministic and probabilistic mathematical programming formulation allowing for scheduling single or multiple correlated changes efficiently. Preliminary experiments are described to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed models. Using these decisions models, organizations can schedule service specification changes with the lowest expected impact on the business. Change Management, Service Transition Management, Change Scheduling, Service-oriented Architectures, Business Impact Analysis, Business-Driven IT Management