Development of an Innovative AHP-Based Decision Support System in the Field of it Service Management

Abstract

The order in which service engineers in the field of IT service management decide to resolve incidents is crucial concerning the impact on the business performance of the IT service provider. A possible solution to reduce negative impacts is to support service engineers by means of a decision support system that calculates priorities for the incidents based on their business impact. Considering these priorities in their decisions, service engineers can help reduce such negative impacts on the IT service provider’s business. The aim of this study is to incorporate the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method into a software to prioritize incidents according to the severity of their business impact. As a result a decision support system called Incident Prioritizer (IP) was developed. It uses the AHP method to calculate priorities for incidents based on typical criteria that are relevant in the field of IT service management to assess the business impact of incidents. These criteria are commonly defined by the management of an IT service provider organization and reflect the management’s understanding of the business impact that is caused by incidents. The results of the work suggest that the AHP method can be successfully applied for the given problem of incident prioritization. A decision model was introduced that consists of one level of criteria that should reflect the factors that contribute to the business impact of incidents. The introduced decision model was intentionally kept simple by using only a few relevant criteria. At the same time it is extensible by adding further criteria as needed.