Assessing and governing IT-staff behavior by performance-based simulation

When optimizing IT operations organizations typically aim to optimize resource usage. In general, there are two kinds of IT resources – IT infrastructures and IT staff. An optimized utilization of these resources requires both quantitative and qualitative analysis. While IT infrastructures can offer raw data for such analyses, data about IT staff often requires additional preparation and augmentation. One source for IT staff-related data can be provided by incident management and ticketing systems. While performance data from such systems is often stored in logfiles it is rarely evaluated extensively. In this article we propose the usage of such data sources for IT staff behavior evaluation and also present the relevant augmentation techniques. We claim that our approach is able to provide more in-depth insights as compared to typical data visualization and dashboard techniques. Our modeling methodology is based on the approach of system dynamics.We also provide formal models and simulation results where we demonstrate the feasibility of the approach using real-life logfiles from an international telecommunication provider.

► Proposed usage of data from IT-Service monitoring systems for IT staff behavior evaluation.
► Evaluation of relevant techniques for augmenting and preparing data.
► Assessment of requirements for advanced simulation-based analysis.
► Provided simulation models based on the approach of system dynamics.
► Experimental results section using logfiles from international telecommunication provider.