Combining business and network simulation models for IT investment evaluation

Although the inherent interrelationships between business processes and the underlying Information Technology (IT) infrastructure imply that the design of these two organisational facets should be performed in parallel, this doesn´t appear to be the case in practice. For example, simulation is being extensively used in both the business and the IT domains, albeit in a disjoint fashion. In this paper, we investigate the potential of integrating different simulation models to facilitate concurrent engineering of business processes and Information Technology. We present an example case of such integration and propose a holistic approach to IT investment evaluation by simulation. Drawing on the case findings, we identify a number of pertinent issues and articulate future research directions towards the integration of simulation usage in the business domain.