Decision-making in IT service management: a simulation based approach

Simulation modeling is widely used to support decision-making in different business areas and management tasks. Given the growing importance for real-world organizations to improve Information Technology Service Management (ITSM), this paper focuses on the application of these techniques to support decision-making in this field. A review of published research articles that describe an application case has been conducted and it shows that different simulation approaches are extensively used to solve particular problems in the context of several processes. However, in these works there is no evidence of a systematic use of both ITSM frameworks and simulation model development methodologies. Given their importance to build valid simulation models, this paper proposes a novel decision-making framework whose main component is a specific methodology to systematically build simulation models that help solve real-world organization problems applying ITIL recommendations. To illustrate the usefulness of this framework, two application cases in the context of the ITIL capacity management and incident management processes are summarized. The model simulations provide information about the process results, performance and behavior with different process configurations. Moreover, optimization experiments allow managers to determine the optimal process configuration that meets the established objectives.