Engineering Adaptive IT Service Support Processes Using Meta-modeling Technologies

Abstract

IT service support is a process-oriented practice that strives to manage the efficient supply of IT services with guaranteed quality. Many organizations adopt best practices and tools in order to improve the maturity of IT service support processes. However, when existing solutions and methodologies are applied in various organizations, the customization efforts and costs are usually large. And also dynamic changes during IT service support process execution can't be supported by almost all of the existed tools. Furthermore, process model integration, reuse and exchange still remain challenges in IT service support process modeling area. In this context, an IT service support process metamodel is presented in this paper. The metamodel extends a generic business process definition metamodel - BPDM, through its domain characteristics. Based on the proposed metamodel, we develop a flexible IT service support process engineering platform, which integrates and automates IT service support processes including incident, problem, change, release and configuration management. In contrast to other IT service support tools, besides process modeling and enactment, it can evolve the metamodel, interchange process models with other tools through metamodel parsing adapter flexibly, and also support adaptive process management via metamodel-based ECA rules.