Facing the unpredictable: Automated adaption of IT change plans for unpredictable management domains

Abstract

Change Management, a core process of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is concerned with the management of changes to IT infrastructure and services to satisfy business goals and to minimize costly disruptions on the business. As part of this process, IT changes are planned for, authorized, tested, scheduled, and executed. Unpredictable incidents, e.g., resource failures or unexpected changes in between planning and execution can render plans infeasible. The execution of unsound plans ultimately leads to service disruptions which threaten the continuity of the business. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a logically sound approach to adapt infeasible IT change plans to a changed management domain in order to render them feasible again. We apply our approach to a case study comprising Virtual Area Network (VLAN) configuration and the deployment of a 2-tier service. For the case study we show that the proposed solution can render IT change plans feasible within minimal time differences regarding unpredictable resource conflicts in 95% of all cases if resource utilization remains below 85%.