A solution to support risk analysis on IT Change Management

Abstract

The growing necessity of organizations in using technologies to support to their operations implies that managing IT resources became a mission-critical issue for the health of the primary companies' businesses. Thus, in order to minimize problems in the IT infrastructure, possibly affecting the daily business operations, risks intrinsic to the change process have to be analyzed and assessed. Risk Management is a widely discussed subject in several areas, although for IT Change Management it is quite a new discipline. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) introduces a set of best practices to conduct the management of IT infrastructures. According to ITIL, risks should be investigated, measured, and mitigated before any change is approved. Even with these guidelines, there is no default automatic method for risk assessment in IT Change Management. In this paper we introduce a risk analysis method based on the execution history of past changes. In addition, we propose a failure representation model to capture the feedback of the execution of changes over IT infrastructures.