Change management in e-infrastructures to support service level agreements

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a common instrument for outlining the responsibility scope of collaborating organizations. They are indispensable for a wide range of industrial and business applications. However, until now SLAs did not receive much attention of the research organizations that are cooperating to provide a comprehensive and sustainable computing infrastructures or e-Infrastructures (eIS) to support the European scientific community. Since many eIS projects have left their development state and are now offering highly mature services, the IT service management aspect becomes relevant. In this article we are concentrating on the inter-organizational change management process. At present, it is very common for eIS changes to be autonomously managed by the individual resource providers. Yet such changes can affect the overall eIS availability and thus have an impact on the SLA metrics, such as performance characteristics and quality of service. We introduce the problem field with the help of a case study. This case study outlines and compares the change management process defined by PRACE and LRZ, which is one of the PRACE eIS partners and resource providers. Our analysis shows, that each of the organizations adopts and follows distinct and incompatible operational model. Following that, we demonstrate how the UMM, a modeling method based on UML and developed by UN/CEFACT, can be applied for the design of inter-organizational change management process. The advantage of this approach is the ability to design both internal and inter-organizational processes with the help of uniform methods. An evaluation of the proposed technique and conclusion ends our article. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.