Knowledge-enhanced change audit for configuration management

Abstract

IT infrastructure is highly complex and changeable for reacting to business update with market change. Unfortunately, change is not always successful. Managing change effectively and reducing the negative effects of day-to-day operations has become one of the most important tasks in IT service management. Beyond recording all configuration items used in the provision of operational services, analysis and audit for the operations on configuration items are more important. One needs to scale or respond to special domain knowledge, collaboration and the right data for helping IT professionals to improve their configuration management. In this paper, a sync audit with Request for Change (RFC) ticket and knowledge-enhanced audit analysis services is proposed to improve change & configuration management quality. The essential contribution of this work is to organize the highly complex IT configuration information with RFC ticket and to build a knowledge repository for accumulating and reusing experts' knowledge for audit. In addition, a prototype is implemented to explore this knowledge-enhanced audit analysis services framework. Finally, a real use case of change management is used for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the knowledge-enhanced audit analysis services framework. © 2010 IEEE.