IT Service Design Research Articles

IT PROJECT MANAGEMENT: OPPORTUNITIES AND SOFTWARE ANALYSIS

The article considers the role of the IT industry in the economy of Ukraine, its revival and development against the background of difficult conditions. The authors emphasize the importance of optimizing management processes. IT service management includes the design, provision, administration and improvement of IT services in an organization or company. Thanks to this, the IT organization can support all business processes as much as possible, because existing software tools can be used not only to optimize IT. In recent years, they have been increasingly used for business processes and other industries. Means of automatic rescheduling of tasks become especially important for large projects taking into account resource limitations, when the manager is not able to independently analyze the reasons for the lack of resources and find a solution for each specific type of work. The publication analyzes modern software tools for IT project management, focusing on three key tools: Jira, Miro and Figma. These programs help streamline project management, increase the efficiency of IT companies and reduce time and resource costs. The article also covers popular alternatives to these tools such as Lucidchart, Cacoo, RealtimeBoard, and Conceptboard. It is the services discussed in the article that are designed to automate current tasks, and a single data environment helps to improve methodology, communication and speed up the work of service departments. Tracking completed tasks and evaluating employee performance makes it easier to distribute the workload of an enterprise's IT team, as well as evaluate its effectiveness. Thus, thanks to its clear structure, IT product management allows to create effective and sustainable solutions. In the future, it is planned to conduct research aimed at summarizing the practice of using software products in the IT industry.

On the Effects of Transaction Data Access Patterns on Performance in Lock-Based Concurrency Control

Transaction Processing (TP) plays a primary role in the design and implementation of IT applications and services. Many TP systems exploit lock-based concurrency control to guarantee atomicity and isolation of transactions that access shared data. In this article, we show that transaction data access patterns, in particular the order of data accesses along the transaction execution, have a noticeable impact on how lock-based concurrency control affects performance. We show that the performance can remarkably change depending on whether transactions, or a percentage of them, access data items following some common ordering rule or not. We investigate on this aspect and its root causes through an analytical modeling approach, and with the evidence of data gathered through both simulation and the execution of real transactional workloads. Finally, we show how the findings of our study can be easily exploited for improving the performance of common transactional workloads.

AVS_FD_MVITS: an agile IT service design workflow for small data centers

AVS_FD_MVITS: an agile IT service design workflow for small data centers

Design of Multidisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system of collaborating computational elements that control and interact with physical entities. These systems can be found in areas such as aerospace, automotive, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, entertainment, and consumer appliances, and can also be categorized as embedded systems, mechatronics, and smart X. In embedded systems the emphasis is on the computational elements, while mechatronic systems focus on the link between the computational and physical elements in terms of mechanical, electronics, control engineering and computer science domains. The design of cyber physical systems (mechatronics, embedded systems, smart X, etc.) is quite distinctive from any other designs, because they address highly complex multidisciplinary issues related to the combination of product/system/service (Rauniyar & Tanik, 2010). The inherent complexity in the design task due to the multidisciplinary aspects of CPS put high stress on engineers’ creativity to produce more innovative solutions. These challenges are known by the Engineering Design community in mechatronics (TorrySmith et al., 2013) but are exacerbated by the added layers of the cyber communication between the different objects, as well as the several challenges of possible IT service design which are of a different engineering nature (Dargahi et al., 2012; Wang, 2012). Therefore, assisting design engineers in design tasks as well as reducing the intrinsic complexity of the modeling is of crucial importance. This can be achieved by either design support tools or new methodologies that would make the design easier and simpler. The papers in this this special issue present the state of the art and advanced techniques related to the development, modelling and simulation of complex CPS. We cover controller design using system architecture, video servoing of robotic systems as well as characterisation of an instrumented dynamic flexible structure. The first paper written by Alvarez Cabrera and Tomiyama entitled “Architecture-Level Representation and Analysis of Regulatory Controller Configuration for Complex Mechatronic Systems” provides a method for automatically extracting information that is relevant for the controller design activities from a model that represents architecture-level information and concerns, and shows how the extracted information can be analyzed for control design purposes. Control design is closely linked to several subsystems within the cyber physical system, and the authors put architecture-level models at the core of the design activities of the control systems. The main contributions of this paper are the use of an architecture model and the extraction of information relevant to control design from it, while the control analysis process is taken from existing linear structured system techniques. The authors’ work provides great insight into how to improve control design, an inherently multidisciplinary, from improvements in the communication and exchange of updated design information between stakeholders during product development of CPS. The second paper, entitled “A Comparative Study on Eye-In-Hand Image-Based Visual Servoing; Stereo vs. Mono” written by Mohebbi et al. presents an application in visual servoing robotics, where

Multi-objective optimization of IT service availability and costs

The continuous provision of highly available IT services is a crucial task for IT service providers in order to fulfill service level agreements with customers. Although the introduction of redundant components increases availability, the associated cost may be very high. Therefore, decision makers in the IT service design stage face a trade-off between cost and availability in order to define suitable service level objectives. Although this task can be seen as a redundancy allocation problem, the existing definitions in this area are not transferable to IT service design due to the assumption of independent component failures, which has been identified as unrealistic in IT systems.In this paper, a multi-objective redundancy allocation problem for IT service design is defined. Therefore, a Petri net Monte Carlo simulation is developed that estimates the availability and costs of a specific design. In order to provide (sub)optimal solutions to an IT service redundancy allocation problem, two meta-heuristics, namely a genetic algorithm and tabu search, are adapted. The approach is utilized to optimize the IT service design of an application service provider in terms of availability and cost to demonstrate its feasibility and suitability.

Bridging Non-functional Requirements and IT Service Design

A fundamental demand for IT service providers is to obtain design skills for non-functional requirements (NFRs) of a target IT enabled service system. The design task should identify a number of NFR determinants, such as the architecture of the IT infrastructure, the operational procedure, and the human resources for service delivery. The satisfaction of NFRs has not been validated after implementation or deployment of the service, which causes extensive redesign work. Thus, a modeling method to bridge NFR and IT service design for reducing such risks is introduced, and an NFR evaluation model is provided. Consequently, IT service designers can validate NFRs in the early development phase.

An Extensive Review of IT Service Design in Seven International ITSM Processes Frameworks

The main international IT Service Management processes frameworks (ITIL v2, ISO/IEC 20000, COBIT 4.0, CMMI-SVC, MOF 4.0, and ITUP) include the design of IT services as part of their main best practices. However, despite having a common purpose and conceptual structure, they are organized differently. Hence, ITSM academic researchers and practitioners need to integrate a broad and diverse literature in relation to these frameworks. In Part I of this research, the authors pursued the goal of a descriptive-comparative analysis of fundamental concepts and IT service architecture design models used in the seven ITSM frameworks. In this paper (Part II) we complete this systemic analysis by using the ISO/IEC 15288 systems engineering standard and focusing on the IT design processes and practices reported in the aforementioned ITSM frameworks. Specifically, CMMI-SVC and ITUP are assessed in overall as the strongest frameworks from an engineering view, MOF 4.0 and ITIL v3 as moderate, and ISO/IEC 20000, ITIL v2 and COBIT as the weakest. ITSM academicians and in particular practitioners thus will need to distinguish their utilization according to the level of required detail of the IT service design process. This paper aims to advance our comprehension and understanding on the state of the art regarding what are IT services and how they can be designed. Thus it is of broad significance to ITSM researchers and practitioners.

Framework for Teaching the Design and Innovation of Green IT Services for High Social Impact

This paper proposes a framework for projects of academic programs related to information and communications technologies. The framework is intended to include sustainability issues, innovation and high social impact. It integrates four domains of practical knowledge: the practices of green information technologies, the framework in information systems research, the guide to the software engineering body of knowledge, the body of knowledge for project management and principles.

Modeling and Analysis of Dependability Attributes for Services Computing Systems

Dependability is an important consideration during the design and development of IT systems and services. But in services computing systems, the traditional definition and evaluation methods from the systems' and components' point of view meet challenges. In this paper, we veer from the angle of view and study the dependability and their attributes from the service-oriented perspective. A stochastic model using the semi-Markov process is put forward, and the quantitative analysis of the dependability attributes is carried out. By extending and transforming this model, the mean time to dependability attributes failure is calculated. Based on the analysis and calculations, some theorems are proposed and proved, to show the inter-relationships and comparisons of the different dependability attributes. Furthermore, we model the service composition and conduct workflow analysis to show how this model could deal with complex services. In addition, LANL service systems are analyzed as a case study to show how the proposed model and calculation methods could apply to real systems, and sensitivity analysis is also performed to identify the bottlenecks and find effective ways for dependability optimization.

An Extensive Review of IT Service Design in Seven International ITSM Processes Frameworks

An IT service design process is considered to be a fundamental piece of the seven key international IT Service Management (ITSM) processes frameworks (ITIL v2, ITIL v3 (and ITIL v2011), ISO 20000-4, CobIT 4.0, CMMI-SVC, MOF 4.0, and ITUP). Nevertheless the availability of IT service design processes, few –if any- descriptive-comparative studies among them have been reported. Thus, in this paper (Part I), we address this knowledge gap. An extensive descriptive-comparative review of seven IT service design processes in aforementioned frameworks is reported. Fundamental concepts (viz., design as noun, design as verb, service, service system, IT service, IT service system, and IT service architecture design) are analyzed by using a Systems Approach. Our findings indicate that the frameworks ITIL v2, ISO/IEC 20000 and Cobit 4.0 are using weak systemic concepts, while the frameworks ITIL v3, CMMI-SVC, ITUP and MOF 4.0 are more foundationally congruent with the new service systems view. Implications for ITSM theory and practice are discussed.

Predicting future users and identifying opportunities for IT product and service design

Based on studies of users’ behaviour patterns or demographic analysis, different types of user modelling and profiling provide an efficient way to identify and present users’ preferences and knowledge backgrounds and help practitioners develop design concepts and evaluate final products. However, in rapid design processes, most user modelling and user studies methodology have narrowed down their scopes to limited groups of target audiences and mainly focus on users’ interactions and requirements towards a particular product or a platform. In this research we reflect on the methodologies used in user studies in three design projects, to propose a research approach that can help researchers, designers and development teams identify both target audiences and potential users earlier in the design stage. Additional benefits of the approach are also discussed, e.g. extending product lines, identifying user motives and requirements, and supporting cross-platform systems and complex services.

IT Service Value Creation in a Global Environment

The design and delivery of IT services is increasingly a global endeavor. Organizations of all types are engaging in global activities enabled by IT services. To meet the needs of global stakeholders and remain competitive in global markets, it is important for the IT services that support global business processes to consistently provide value that meets or exceeds customer expectations. However, little guidance is found in the academic or practitioner literature regarding how to create IT service value in a global context. Drawing from the organization science and service science literature domains, and using an analytical conceptual research methodology, this research develops a Global IT Service Value Creation (GITSVC) Framework and Process Model to address this gap in the literature. The GITSVC Framework and Process Model are tools that can be used to guide practice and future research. Implications and recommendations for theory and practice are discussed.

WHY DO THE ORDERS GO WRONG ALL THE TIME?

In this paper we discuss sustainability, particularly social and cultural sustainability, in relation to an e-commerce application used in the kitchen of a Swedish public school. The notion of sustainability got its public definition through the Brundtland Commission and the report Our Common Future in which ecological as well as economic and social dimensions were underlined. An additional dimension, culture, has recently unfolded. The data reported in this paper were collected in public school and pre-school meal production. This is a large, institutional, tax-funded activity in Sweden as all pre-schools, compulsory schools and most upper secondary schools serve free lunch to the children and students. We discuss how an e-commerce application complicated the daily routines in the school kitchen rather than making the ordering of food stuff easier or more flexible and how small things that mattered in the staff's day-to-day activities shed light on the application's problems and weaknesses. Following Agenda 21, we relate these shortcomings to sustainability and also to participation. The discussion builds on social and cultural sustainability and participatory design with a focus on the involvement of users in design and implementation of IT systems and services.

Geodemographic classifications, the digital divide and understanding customer take-up of new technologies

The imperatives of social cohesion make it necessary to consider the highly variable characteristics of users alongside the design and implementation of IT networks and services. In this context much has been written on the so-called ‘digital divide’ in society. Recent ESRC-funded research at UCL has illustrated how it is simplistic to think of the impacts of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in terms of a single, or even small number of, ‘digital divides’. As developments in what has been termed the ‘e-society’ reach wider and more generalised audiences, so it becomes appropriate to think of digital media as having wider-ranging but differentiated impacts upon consumer transactions, information gathering and citizen participation. This paper describes the development of a detailed, nationwide household classification based on levels of awareness of different ICTs, levels of use of ICTs, and their perceived impacts upon human capital formation and the quality of life. It illustrates how geodemographic classification makes it possible to provide context for detailed case studies, and hence identify how policy might best improve both the quality and degree of society’s access to ICTs. We have provided a more detailed overview of the methodology elsewhere [1, 2] and here we also illustrate how the classification may be used to investigate a range of regional and sub-regional policy issues. A particularly innovative aspect of this classification is the Web resource hosted at www.spatial-literacy.org/esocietyprofiler. This site makes it possible to look at the classification system, aggregated to unit postcodes, across Great Britain. Users can look at national distributions for each of the groups and types in the classification, and offer feedback as to whether the classification appears to work for any locality.