Modeling IT Support Organizations from Transactional Logs

There is great interest in building an accurate theoretical model of IT support organizations, for several purposes such as optimal workforce allocation and what-if scenario analysis. However, the complexity of real-life IT support organizations makes it extremely hard to model their organizational, structural and behavioral processes. While the adoption of stationary stochastic processes to model incident arrivals and of first-come-first-served GI/G/N queues to model support groups permits to reproduce with good enough fidelity the organization-wide behavior, this approach does not always accurately capture the internal dynamics of the organization. This paper presents an experimental analysis of transaction logs from a real-life IT support organization, provided to us by the Outsourcing Services Division of HP. The statistical analysis of transactional logs allows us to make some interesting considerations that can be used to build a more accurate model of the organization, as well as to gain useful experience in the modeling process.