SYMIAN: A simulation tool for the optimization of the IT incident management process

Abstract

Incident Management is the process through which IT support organizations manage to restore normal service operation after a service disruption. The complexity of IT support organizations makes it extremely hard to understand the impact of organizational, structural and behavioral components on the performance of the currently adopted incident management strategy and, consequently, which actions could improve it. This paper presents SYMIAN, a decision support tool for the improvement of incident management performance. SYMIAN is a discrete event simulator that permits to test possible corrective measures for the IT support organization before the expensive actual implementation. SYMIAN models the IT support organization as a queuing system, considering both the time spent by operators working on incidents and the time spent when waiting for operator's availability. Experimental results show the SYMIAN effectiveness in the performance analysis and optimization of the incident resolution time for a fictitious organization designed according to real-life experiences. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.