CHANGELEDGE: Change design and planning in networked systems based on reuse of knowledge and automation

• Published in: Computer networks (Amsterdam, Netherlands : 1999) Netherlands : 1999), 2009-11, Vol.53 (16), p.2782-2799
• Main Authors: DA COSTA CORDEIRO, Weverton Luis, SPERB MACHADO, Guilherme, GIRARDI ANDREIS, Fabricio, DOS SANTOS, Alan Diego, BONATO BOTH, Cristiano, GASPARY, Luciano Paschoal, ZAMBENEDETTI GRANVILLE, Lisandro, BARTOLINI, Claudio, TRASTOUR, David
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Best practice; Exact sciences and technology; Information technology; Knowledge; Knowledge management; Management of change; Miscellaneous; Organization and planning of networks (techniques and equipments); Planning; Studies; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; Valuation and optimization of characteristics. Simulation
• ISSN: 1389-1286; 1872-7069
• DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2009.07.001

Proper management of Information Technology (IT) resources and services has become imperative for the success of modern organizations. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) represents, in this context, the most widely accepted framework to help achieve this end. Among the processes that compose ITIL, change management has an important role in defining best practices and processes for the efficient and prompt handling of IT changes. In practice, however, such changes are usually described and documented in an ad hoc fashion, due to the lack of proper support to assist the design process. This hampers knowledge acquired when specifying, planning, and carrying out previous changes to be reused in subsequent requests, even though such reuse may result in fewer incidents and faster specification of change plans. To address this problem, in this paper we present a Related Articles in ScienceDirect conceptual solution to support the design and planning of IT changes and explore the concept of change templates as a mechanism to formalize, preserve, and (re)use knowledge in the specification of (recurrent and similar) IT changes. To prove concept and technical feasibility of the proposed solution, we have developed a prototypical implementation of a change management system called ChangeLedge and used it to carry out a set of experiments, considering typical IT changes. The results obtained indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of the system, which is able to generate accurate and actionable change plans in substantially less time than would be spent by a skilled human operator. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]