Estimating business value of IT services through process complexity analysis

In this paper we propose a methodology to estimate business value of IT services. We investigate how to apply quantitative studies for IT service management processes that allows us to link measurable performance improvements with concrete business value. Specifically, we follow an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) defined strategy combined with process complexity analysis techniques. This helps to reason about inefficiencies in IT service processes due to problems with coordination of different roles, lack of support for task execution, and complexities for getting the source of information. Our approach consists in (1) identifying the process context using ITIL as a reference framework, (2) quantifying process baseline with typical task execution time and underlying complexity, (3) estimating performance improvement achieved by tooling deployment or process transformation, and (4) estimating business value derived for various business cases. We illustrate our methodology using the change management process as defined in IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) and estimating the business value of implementing an application discovery tool and a change management tool.