IT Support Conversation Manager: A Conversation-Centered Approach and Tool for IT Incident Management

© IT Support Conversation Manager: A Conversation-Centered Approach and Tool for IT Incident Management Hamid R. Motahari-Nezhad, Claudio Bartolini, Sven Graupner, Sharad Singhal, Susan Spence HP Laboratories HPL-2010-46 Ad-hoc Business Processes, Best Practice Process Frameworks, IT Processes, Collaboration Applications There is a push in the enterprise towards facilitating processes from best practice frameworks (such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)) to make them more repeatable, efficient and cost-effective. Best practice processes provide descriptive, high level guidelines rather than prescriptive, precise process model definitions. They are meant to be followed by people and may be adapted and enacted differently in various realizations. Currently, ITIL processes are supported by tools that hard code an interpretation of the process logic, or by people who use productivity tools. This is inefficient due to the rigidity of process logic encoded in existing tools which does not allow collaborative and flexible realizations of processes. Moreover, there is the issue of information loss when people are only using rigid productivity tools that force them to collaborate outside of tools. In this paper, we present a light-weight conversation-centered approach and a tool for dynamic and flexible definition and enactment of best practice processes in a collaborative and interactive manner. It addresses the issue of information loss by using the concept of a conversation as a container of information about the interaction among people in the context of a process. It offers a process template definition language and a semi-structured process model that supports flexible and adaptive processes. We showcase the approach using an illustrative use case based on best practice processes from ITIL, namely incident and problem management. External Posting Date: April 6, 2010 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: April 6, 2010 [Fulltext] Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. IT Support Conversation Manager: A Conversation-Centered Approach and Tool for IT Incident Management Hamid R. Motahari-Nezhad, Claudio Bartolini, Sven Graupner, Sharad Singhal, Susan Spence Service Automation and Integration Lab Hewlett Packard Laboratories