Claudio Bartolini

In this paper we review several novel approaches for research evaluation. We start with a brief overview of the peer review, its controversies, and metrics for assessing efficiency and overall quality of the peer review. We then discuss five approaches, including reputation-based ones, that come out of the research carried out by the LiquidPub project and research groups collaborated with LiquidPub. Those approaches are alternative or complementary to traditional peer review. We discuss pros and cons of the proposed approaches and conclude with a vision for the future of the research evaluation, arguing that no single system can suit all stakeholders in various communities.

Incident management is the process through which the IT support organization manages to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and with minimum disruption to the business. One of the ultimate measures of an IT support organization's success is the amount of time it takes to resolve an incident. Reducing this value not only reduces total cost and resource allocation but also increases customer satisfaction, which is one of the most important measures of a support center's performance. However, the support organization is often unable to collect data on their performance, let alone experiment with the consequences of reshuffling the organization and playing with alternative stalling levels. In this paper, we present our approach to assessing and improving the performance of an IT support organization in managing service incidents, based on the definition of a set of performance metrics and a methodology for guided analysis that allows a user to find the root causes of poor performance and decide on corrective actions to be taken. We provide validation of the approach by discussing its application a real-life case study of a leading IT provider for the airline industry.

Business-driven IT management (BDIM) aims at managing enterprise IT infrastructure and services efficiently and at improving business results at the same time. BDIM is based on mappings between IT technical performance metrics and business relevant metrics and exploit the linkage to provide decision support to IT management so as to maximize business value and IT-Business alignment. As an example, the number of successfully executed IT infrastructure changes can be mapped to financial loss due to the service disruption experienced by customers when the changes take place. Up to now, there has been some research effort in proposing and applying BDIM solutions to IT management with potential gains for the business. However, much remains to be researched, prototyped and validated before this new IT management discipline can become widely applicable. This paper presents a research agenda for BDIM. After reviewing BDIM concepts and proposing a framework to assist in defining and describing BDIM usage domains, the paper discusses ongoing work and outlines some research challenges.

Change management is one of the most critical processes in IT management. Some of the reasons are the sheer number of changes and the difficulty of evaluating the impact of changes on the IT services being provided. Through carrying out a survey with IT managers and practitioners, we have found that, among the activities performed during change management, change scheduling (allocating changes to change windows) is the most problematic one. In this paper we solve the change scheduling problem by using a business-driven approach that evaluates the impact of a change schedule in terms of the financial loss imposed on the service provider. Toward this aim, we model the impact of SLA violations when the implementation of changes is done after their deadline. A change scheduling optimization problem is then formalized and its solution is applied to a typical scenario. The results show that optimizing the scheduling of changes can result in significant savings to an IT support organization.

In this paper we address the problem of ensuring business-IT alignment. We describe a method and a system for decision support in IT service management driven by alignment with the business objectives of the enterprise that the IT supports. Our technical proposition, called IT management by business objectives (MBO) is applicable to most of the domains of IT service management, such as incident management, change management, and others. The technology consists of some components that are reusable across domains, together with guidelines and patterns for building complementary components in order to develop domain-specific solutions