Business-impact analysis and simulation of critical incidents in IT service management

Service disruptions can have a considerable impact on business operations of IT support organizations, thus calling for the implementation of efficient incident management and service restoration processes. The evaluation and improvement of incident management strategies currently in place, in order to minimize the business-impact of major service disruptions, is a very arduous task which goes beyond the optimization with respect to IT-level metrics. This paper presents HANNIBAL, a decision support tool for the business impact analysis and improvement of the incident management process. HANNIBAL evaluates possible strategies for an IT support organization to deal with major service disruptions. HANNIBAL then selects the strategy with the best alignment to the business objectives. Experimental results collected from the HANNIBAL application to a realistic case study show that business impact-driven optimization outperforms traditional performance-driven optimization.