IT Business Service-Level-Management—An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach

Bridging from IT-centric service levels, written in IT technical terms, to business-oriented service achievement is a hot topic in today’s service research. The proposed ‘IFSFIA’ methodology will help for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to relate metrics for business applications into measurable parameters for technical services that can be defined and reported against a SLA and monitored under Service Level Management. It allows assessing the complex dependency and impact relationships of low-level backend components to the quality of the frontend service. This work defines dependency couplings in a practical and feasible manner in order to satisfy aspects of the distributed nature of SLAs in a multi-tier-architectural environment. The concept starts from the idea of naturally approaching impact relationships by separately envisaging positive and negative aspects with the notion of bipolarity. Performing a multi-level impact analysis by means of intuitionistic fuzzy-mathematical models it unveils business insights into how service accounts as a whole can improve quality and allows pro-actively tracking measures of backend components to gather the overall SLA quality status of a business service.