Giovanni Pignatelli

Aligning IT Service Levels and Business Performance: A Case Study

TSF is an Italian IT service company, focused on logistics and transportation IT market segments.. It is able to support customer’s business operations through a complex IT service chain, appraised by a Service Level Management (SLM) system. Due to the long term contractual relationship (10 years) with Italian Railways, TSF developed a symbiotic relationship with its main customer, becoming co-accountable for its business performance. This aspect has highlighted the necessity of the definition of an extended SLM model able to correlate the customer business performances with the delivered ICT service levels, in the perspective of an end-to-end service delivery chain. The paper illustrates the conceptual approach and the method adopted to overcome this problem in a pilot project.

Business Capabilities Centric Enterprise Architecture

In the field of Enterprise Architecture, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is a well known framework, that links Business Architecture, Data Architecture, Application Architecture, Technology. A key concept within Business Architecture domain is Business Capabilities, that are delivered by Business Component (BC). A BC is a business unit that encompasses a coherent set of activities, supported by assets including people, processes and technology. Current TOGAF version recognizes the BC requirements but misses how to bridge those requirements with a data, application and technology architecture. Defining the bridge is specifically the purpose of our extension called Business Capabilities Centric Enterprise Architecture (BCCE), where we adapt some TOGAF phases, extend the core TOGAF meta-model and add architectural contents. We have validated our approach on a telecommunication example taken from literature. A major benefit of the proposed extension is to link changes of business to data, application and technology architectures.

Service Level Analysis method - SLAM

We illustrate a conceptual framework for business oriented Service Level Management (SLM). Currently IT systems are complex objects that support business operations. To be meaningful, a control system should link business and IT performances. This need, though recognized by most IT management frameworks, is not specifically analyzed. Defining a methodology capable to identify this link is the purpose of our work. The proposed methodology identifies relevant IT systems supporting business activities. The key novelty is that the integration between business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and IT systems KPIs is performed through a new uptake of Use Case approach. The paper illustrates the conceptual framework, the method and its use in a large transportation organization. The proposed approach has been successfully used by an organization.

Strategic Modelling of Enterprise Information Requirements

We illustrate a model to define information requirements for the whole Enterprise. The key novelty is that the model is a normative one. Actually it assists the analyst in defining the contents data bases should have. The approach is founded on some key ideas. First, an enterprise processes information on domain families, that include stakeholders, products, process and contexts. By specializing these domain families the analyst identifies domains specific to an individual enterprise. Second, information of a given domain includes different information types, namely master information, that defines structural properties, transaction information, performance / analytical indicators. By crossing information domains and information types the analyst identifies normative entities, that can be used to assess effectiveness and coverage of actual data bases and other IT strategy issues and, of course, to design a top-down design of the data base. The model develops and generalizes the Aggregate Business Entity incorporated the e-TOM framework, a reference model developed for telecommunications, and it has been tested in a pilot project in health care.

ICT Portfolio: Mapping Business and ICT Services

This paper presents a research project of University of Pavia that has been implemented by Business Integration Partners (BIP). The project concerns a Knowledge Base on Business and IT Processes. The Knowledge Base maps Business and related IT Processes and stores knowledge structures in different forms, such as diagrams, text, multimedia. The analyst can navigate stored information and create new processes by using a design methodology, that includes the definition of process structure, the association of performances to process structures and the design of a individual process performances by using inheritance methods. The Knowledge Base was successfully implemented in a large telecommunication organization.

Higher Education Curricula for Services Science

A growing number of universities are offering curricula that are labeled as Services Sciences and/or Services Engineering or that are actually oriented to Services Sciences. We here review their contents, by a specific taxonomy of competences, founded on a Delphi research. A key of Services Sciences and/or Services Engineering curricula is the overlap between a service oriented concept of IT and the organizational analysis of business processes. To better exemplify a real world approach we analyze the case of University of Pavia that launched a Master of Science Curriculum in 2006. First in Europe, it integrates a strong background on enterprise systems with a practice of a model driven approach to the design and implementation of business processes and related IT services.

Research issues in designing Services for Quality

Designing a Service for Quality should be achieved by a model driven design from business needs level down to implementation level. This paper intends to introduce the key issues that spin around designing Quality of Service (QoS) oriented business services and it describes also a possible set of solutions and guidelines. The main novelties are the integration of performances modelling and functional modelling. This would result in a performance oriented extension of business process notation and execution languages as well as of methodologies for business processes design.