Simulation Environment for IT Service Support Processes: Supporting Service Providers in Estimating Service Levels for Incident Management

Because of a steadily increasing market for IT services, providers need to set apart from their competitors in order to successfully assert with their service offerings in the market. As compliance with negotiated service levels is becoming more and more important for service providers, the improvement of the quality of operational IT service support processes is coming to the fore. In this paper we present an approach based on discrete-event simulation in order to do a priori estimations on ticket workloads within a skills-based IT service desk. Service providers can perform tool-supported capability planning (analysis & optimization) during design time based on the potential impact of ticket workloads to agreed service levels. We additionally show how obtained results can be taken into account for determining service levels in Service Level Agreements (SLA).