It management

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An Introductory Overview and Survey of Business-Driven IT Management
Jacques Sauvé, Antão Moura, Marcus Sampaio Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil {jacques, antao, sampaio}@dsc.ufcg.edu.br Abstract - Business-driven IT management (BDIM) is a new, evolutionary and comprehensive IT management approach that aims to improve IT infrastructure, service quality and business results atthe same time. To that end, it needs to model and numerically estimate ITbusiness linkage. BDIM concepts are finding ways into ITIL-based management processes as well as into new IT infrastructure product offerings such as autonomic computing in order to add increased value to the business. In the hope of contributing to define and characterize this new approach, this paper presents anintroductory overview of BDIM, discusses its main concepts, illustrates gains over conventional IT management approaches and offers a survey of some recent work on the topic in the literature. Keywords: Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM), IT governance, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), business metrics, modeling, performance evaluation, automation. João Jornada, Eduardo RadziukHewlett-Packard Brazil Research & Development {joao.jornada,eduardo.radziuk}@hp.com moted domain-centered IT management: policing systems to protect and ensure proper operations and assisting users through a help desk function. IT management became more user-centric with IT Service Management (ITSM) under which the IT department’s role becomes that of a service provider; one then views IT in both atechnical and users’ perspectives. This has led to a set of popular best practices: the Information Technology Infrastructure Library framework[4]. This led to service catalogs and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by which certain promises are made to customers about the quality of the service provided. ITSM allows IT personnel to better understand the needs of the business and act accordingly. However,ITSM mostly uses technical metrics – usually availability, throughput and response time – to gauge the quality of service (QoS) offered to the user. This is true at least in the very important Service Level Management ITIL process. For other processes such as change management, metrics may be altogether different but they still reflect how smoothly IT operations are running. IT personnel makedecisions which may not serve the business best when the only operations smoothness is considered; business needs are best served when business metrics – such as cost or revenue – are considered to gauge business impact. BDIM argues that basing IT decisions on IT metrics leads to suboptimal decisions, larger adverse financial impact on the business and, possibly, lower user and customer satisfaction.This paper illustrates some of these arguments. We now witness the dawn of the next age: BusinessDriven IT Management (BDIM). The focus of BDIM is on the business: IT must help the business to achieve its goals, contributing to its results in a measurable way. Business metrics are not only the corporate user’s language, they are also the language used by executives. It is not easy to sell IT tosenior executives when all one has to report is some percentage of service availability or the attainment of – or failure to achieve – SLA objectives. Reporting to top executives is much easier when business metrics are used. ITSM with business metrics can be a powerful communication tool with the user and with top executives. BDIM is ITSM with business metrics. BDIM attempts to gauge the impactthat IT has on the business and aims at rethinking IT management from this perspective, whether this be in an operational, tactical or strategic context. As such, BDIM also offers support to IT

I. INTRODUCTION
Over the years, information technology (IT) departments have faced the challenge of providing services efficiently and in a cost-effective way to corporate users and clients. IT...