Connecting the dots in IT service delivery: From operations content to high-level business insights

IT service delivery relies on intelligent data-driven insights to make strategic decisions. It is a highly complex business with many sub-organizations that focus on different aspects of delivery operations. High-level business insights that emerge from understanding the collective value of all these viewpoints are invaluable to achieving excellent service quality and solid profit margin. However, this is hindered by the inability to integrate data models and taxonomies across business components such as asset management, configuration management, and incident management. Innovative solutions are necessary to effectively "connect-the-dots", bridging the gaps between available content and higher-level business insights. In this paper, we describe several real-world business decisions in service delivery and logistics that suffer from this content-model gap. We propose a unified approach to bridge this gap, with an information system component called Business-Knowledge Discovery Component. We discuss key challenges, architectural framework and the text analytic techniques that are involved. © 2012 IEEE.