Potential Benefits and Challenges of Closed-Loop Optimization Processes for IT Support Organizations

IT services are getting increasingly complicated, and require IT support organization to manage them. IT support organization are in charge of the incident management process and represent mission-critical structures whose performance needs to be frequently assessed and optimized. State-of-the-art research in the performance optimization of IT support organization proposes user-driven performance assessment and optimization processes based on what-if scenario analysis tools that implement sophisticated IT support organization models. This manuscript instead represents a preliminary study of a different kind of optimization processes, of the closed-loop type, that try to autonomously identify optimal IT support organization configurations according to inputs provided by the user. This paper discusses the development challenges in realizing decision support tools for closed-loop optimization processes and presents a prototype system. The preliminary evaluation of our tool demonstrates that closed-loop processes might be impractical as reference tools but can effectively complement and extend human-driven ones.