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2018 | Buch

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Improving Service Level Engineering

An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach

verfasst von: Roland Schütze

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Fuzzy Management Methods

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book examines how fuzzy methods can be employed to manage service levels in business and IT alignment. It starts by mapping the dependencies of service level agreements, coming up with gradual and bi-polar concepts to eventually classify the level of coupling by intuitionistic fuzzy sets. The second part presents an approach to analyze the impact of service failures using intuitionistic fuzzy methods (IFSFIA). Lastly, the third part of the book extends the concept towards business and IT-aligned service-level engineering and provides two use cases.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Business and IT Alignment: A Fuzzy Challenge

Abstract

In order to position companies in a competitive environment, it is important to create new technologies and thereby to gain unique selling points and strengthening-position. This promotion, regarding information technology (IT), would represent a substantial contribution success for an enterprise (Kopp 2011). Information Technology is the key instrument for the implementation of the corporate goals (Liebert 2012). In parallel for the use of IT, a clear strategy is needed (Helmke and Uebel 2013) which enables a business organization to use IT effectively to achieve business objectives, i.e. improved financial performance or marketplace competitiveness.

Roland Schütze

SLA Dependency Mapping: Towards a Gradual and Bi-polar Concept

Frontmatter

Chapter 2. The Complexity of Virtualized SLA Dependencies

Abstract

The Service Level Agreements (SLAs) incorporate the expectations and the obligations about the properties of a service. Service Level Agreements are documents which define the relationships between two parties: the provider and the recipient (Service Level Agreement Zone 2007). This Agreement works as a contract between the two. The most significant part of a SLA is the range of the duties of a service that contains a description of the offered service, the constraints, the steps required for a delivery of a service and the agreed objectives between a service provider and a service requestor. Those objectives are mostly the concerns that are associated with the Quality of a Service (QoS), as shown in the Fig. 2.1 below.

Roland Schütze

Chapter 3. Couplings: A Bi-polar Concept

Abstract

Within the KPI association graph in Chap. 2 all different types of KPI translations and correlations of all kind of services have been generalized into one association, further called “Dependence Coupling”. According to (Keller et al. 2000), service “dependencies represent consumer/provider relationships between various cooperating components in a distributed system”. The operability of dependent component requires a service performed by antecedent component. The relations between service components can be logical (is connected to) and physical (is used by).

Roland Schütze

Chapter 4. Classifying the Level of Coupling by Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets

Abstract

The non-functional requirements defined within the scope of a SLA are fuzzy by their nature. Therefore they may be conveniently modelled by the fuzzy methods applied and integrated into the description of service characteristics. There are several proposals for modelling mainly non-functional service requirements by usage of fuzzy methods. This allows to describe also those customer requirements which are often ill-defined or fuzzy. The need for specific and verifiable user requirements is obvious. The verification process of fuzzy requirements often significantly increases the understanding of the requirements, mostly due to the need to articulate everything explicit (Muller 2011).

Roland Schütze

Intuitionistic Fuzzy Service Failure Impact Analysis (IFSFIA)

Frontmatter

Chapter 5. IFSFIA Solution Approach

Abstract

Service Management Standards are influenced by the range and quality of methods and techniques and benefits of established best practices. ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) provides a best practice based framework, developed since the late 1980th by the UK Office of Government Commerce. It is the most widely used and accepted approach to IT Service Management (ITSM) around the world. ITIL includes several valuable management ideas and well-tried procedures (Van Haren 2008).

Roland Schütze

Chapter 6. IFSFIA Use Case Within a Data-Centre Environment

Abstract

In the following described example based on real-world data-within an application hosting environment, a failure event at an infrastructure component is alerted, e.g. in the scenario below a database server failed to start a required database service. This incident is discovered via monitoring the correct start and availability of the relevant database services using standard monitoring tools like IBM Tivoli Monitoring (Jacob et al. 2009) and an error event is created which automatically results in a problem ticket for the corresponding service desk. As today’s enterprise business service management should not only be concerned about a failed component, they must be more concerned with the impact of that component on the business. Unfortunately this relation and the dependencies are not obvious and the impact of this failure cannot be assessed at all by the service desk maintaining the database infrastructure.

Roland Schütze

Towards ‘Business and IT’ Aligned Service Level Engineering

Frontmatter

Chapter 7. An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach for Service Level Management

Abstract

That the subject of ‘IT-business alignment’ (Masak 2006) has been one of the top tasks for the responsible of IT and business side for a long time, is illustrated in the study ‘Top 10 IT Management Concerns’. The study shows again and again that ‘IT and Business Alignment’ has an important place for the companies over a long time. Between 2003 and 2010 the “IT and Business Alignment” was 5 times the number one in the priority list of the Chief Information Officers (CIO), two times number two and one time number three. This topic was followed with a longer distance in prioritizing by “IT strategic planning”, ‘Business agility and speed to market’, ‘Business productivity and cost reduction’, “Business agility and speed to market”, ‘IT reliability and efficiency’, ‘IT cost reduction’, ‘Security and privacy’, ‘Revenue-generating IT innovations’, ‘Business process re-engineering’ and ‘Globalization’ (Luftman and Ben-Zvi 2010).

Roland Schütze

Chapter 8. Use Cases for Business Impact Assessments

Abstract

The following chapter presents the application of the fuzzy-intuitionistic approach to the dependency model developed within a complex e-health platform hosting environment.at a leading provider of IT solutions and outsourcing services in Switzerland within the master thesis of Daria Balkenende (Kurochkina 2015). The Swiss Health Platform (SHP) modules support business processes of insurance companies from product development through sales, portfolio management, and claims management to general support and reporting. A customer can request whole SHP package or certain modules independently from a core application. These comprises archive, workflow, provisioning, management, evaluation, and brokerage system.

Roland Schütze

Chapter 9. Conclusion

Abstract

The PhD thesis is grouped into three parts. Each part covers a major subject area of this thesis. The next paragraphs discusses the underlying chapters for each part.

Roland Schütze

Backmatter

Titel: Improving Service Level Engineering
verfasst von: Roland Schütze
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-59716-4
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59715-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59716-4