SYMIAN: Analysis and performance improvement of the IT incident management process

Incident Management is the process through which IT support organizations manage to restore normal service operation after a service disruption. The complexity of real-life enterprise-class IT support organizations makes it extremely hard to understand the impact of organizational, structural and behavioral components on the performance of the currently adopted incident management strategy and, consequently, which actions could improve it. This paper presents SYMIAN, a decision support tool for the performance improvement of the incident management function in IT support organizations. SYMIAN simulates the effect of corrective measures before their actual implementation, enabling time, effort, and cost saving. To this end, SYMIAN models the IT support organization as an open queuing network, thereby enabling the evaluation of both the system-wide dynamics as well as the behavior of the individual organization components and their interactions. Experimental results show the SYMIAN effectiveness in the performance analysis and tuning of the incident management process for real-life IT support organizations.