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IT service operation management has an important role in supporting the effectiveness and alignment of various IT service processes in an organization. We choose The National Land Agency of the Republic of Indonesia (BPN RI) as an object of our research, because BPN RI is a provider of public services. BPN RI must maintain the operational quality of its services. However, the handling of service issues in the helpdesk system has several problems: incident accumulation, length of time handling and provision of solutions that often do not hit the right targets leads to a decrease in service quality and hampered business process continuity. This study aims to evaluate IT Service Operation in BPN RI help desk system to find out gap and then give recommendation of IT Service Operation management based on ITIL V3 best practice focusing on incident management process and problem management. The recommendation can be a best practice for another organization that provide public services too. The research method uses the P-D-C-A cycle, starting from the Check stage, Act, then Plan to know the condition of IT service operation, perform the analysis, and plan the recommendation. The result of the evaluation are the absence of standard operational procedures and many incompatibilities of incident and problem management process. The recommendations after analysis of IT Services operation are among other things is to create an automated detection and create a problem record to directly detect the possibility of recurring incidents to minimize the buildup of problems.

This research intends to analyze the maturity level of IT infrastructure among Local Colleges and Universities (LUCs) in Laguna, Philippines. It aims: 1) to identify the IT infrastructures utilized in LUCs specifically the hardware, software, network, and peopleware; 2) to determine the maturity level of IT infrastructure in LUCs in terms of incident management, request fulfillment management, and problem management, and; 3) to devise a framework that will assist these LUCs to improve and sustain their IT infrastructures. The study utilized quantitative research design and established criteria among intended LUCs. With IT infrastructures' maturity level, most LUCs indicated Level 1, interpreted as “Initial” which revealed that there are IT processes that needs to be documented. These findings serve as the input to Technology Management (TM) framework that can be used to improve and sustain their IT infrastructure. The said framework provides a concrete plan to ensure that IT infrastructure is well managed and will not lead to wastage.

In programming courses, a good learning platform can reduce the teaching loads and improve the program learning efficiency. Currently, there are many online judge systems on the internet. These systems can automatically check the correctness of the programs submitted by a user, which is very helpful for program learning. However, most of the systems are designed specifically to solve programming problems, not for classroom instruction. After several years of teaching, we decided to design an online platform that is more suitable for our programming courses. The designed platform not only be able to check the correctness of the submitted codes, but also provides some features for teaching, including course management, student management, and problem management. In addition, it can check the format of the submitted code and provide feedback to help students develop a good coding habit. It also provides teachers with software broadcast function, and statistical data to examine the class learning performance. After a semester of testing, we did find that the platform is a very useful teaching tool.

Laparoscopic surgeons should possess strong cognitive knowledge, case/problem management and manual dexterity skills. Such skills can be acquired through simulation using a basic, low-fidelity setup, such as the surgical box-trainer. The trainee’s performance is evaluated on the grounds of both precision and speed. However, no significant qualitative and quantitative information is measured and recorded electronically. The main objective of this research is to develop an intelligent box-trainer device which includes sensors and several high definition digital video cameras along with a two-layer fuzzy logic-based assessment system. The significance of the project is to create an intelligent performance assessment system that is much more objective than the ones which are currently being used. Using fuzzy logic to capture expert knowledge is a new approach in this area.

Information Technology is an integral part of the industry for a long time and the role of Services has increased in last 10 years. IT had been playing a major role in the Manufacturing sector in the first half of the decade, which now has shifted to the Services. With this shift in focus of the industry, from Manufacturing to Services, there arises a need of certain set of policies and standard procedures, which help the organizations in providing up to the mark services to their customers, and improved customer relations. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is such a set of best practices and standard procedures, which helps in practicing better Information Technology Service Management (ITSM). This paper studies some of the benefits of the Service Operations process named Incident Management of the ITIL and highlight its best practices. The paper will give a detailed description of Incident Management from the User perspective, as well as from the Administrator and Developer perspective. The automation of this out-of-box vendor-provided process can help the users in using the ITSM tools more efficiently. This paper also studies the benefits of hosting the servers on Cloud as well as how it may help in using the ITSM tools on the go.

The various problems regularly encountered in urban residential environments can have significant impact on citizen's quality of life, while simultaneously their identification, reporting and management by the responsible authorities entail a very demanding process. Providing citizens with mobile applications for participatory reporting (i.e. crowdsourcing) of problems may help streamline the work of relevant municipal services; such citizen-centric services will make the city smarter through enhanced problem management and request processing. In this article, we introduce two new mobile applications, CityCare and CityCareW, which are complementary with respect to each other and cover all phases of a problem report lifecycle. They incorporate innovative mechanisms that allow the detection of the most critical problems, as well as duplicate problem reports while gamification mechanisms are applied to motivate citizen participation. Trial evaluations have shown that the two applications are user-friendly and satisfy their end-users to a very considerable extent.

At present information security (IS) incidents have become not only more numerous and diverse but also more damaging and disruptive. Preventive controls based on the IS risk assessment results decrease the majority but not all the IS incidents. Therefore, an IS incident management system is necessary for rapidly detecting IS incidents, minimizing loss and destruction, mitigating the vulnerabilities that were exploited and restoring the Internet of Things infrastructure (IoTI), including its IT services. These systems can be implemented on the basis of a Security Operations Center (SOC). Based on the related works a survey of the existing SOCs, their mission and main functions is given. The SOCs' classification as well as the key indicators of IS incidents in IoTI are proposed. Some serious first-generation SOCs' limitations are defined. This analysis leads to the main area of further research launched by the author.

‘Cyber Incidents’ are common in every domain where technology is prevalent. Recurring or sequential incidents are not unusual and are often manageable. Whilst more rare, the incidents that reach crisis levels have been shown to cause an unexpected amount of damage.

It is common knowledge in the IT service domain that changes to the system configuration are responsible for a major portion of incidents that result in client outages. However, it is typically very difficult to establish a relationship between changes and incidents as proper documentation takes lower priority at change creation time, as well as during incident management, in order to deal with the tremendous time pressure to quickly implement changes and resolve incidents. As a result, it is often not possible to leverage historical data to perform retrospective analysis to identify any emerging trends linking changes to incidents, or to build predictive models for proactive incident prevention at change creation time. In this paper, we present an approach for establishing causality between changes and incidents through an ensemble of statistics, data classification, and natural language processing techniques. We demonstrate our approach with a real world example.

This article is focused on the problem how to minimize the damage of an economic entity because of reputation loss as a result of information security incidents. There are many techniques concerning such kind of problem worldwide. However the issues of using the analysis tools of information security incidents are paid not much attention, so the organizations can seriously damage their reputation and obviously decrease their commercial profits. The article describes an approach to define the parameters for reputational risk due to information security incidents. The article defines how to determine the source of incidents and to form a list of actual threats and to calculate the consequences of their implementation. The article offers the techniques of the reputational risk management due to information security incidents. The techniques can be implemented in any organization, no matter how big it is and no matter which kind of business it is occupied.

VINST is a system used to record all activities related to the incident and problem management in Volvo IT Belgium. In this VINST system, activities recorded in several attributes, such as serial number, change date and time, status, and any other attributes needed, which is stored in the event log. In these sequenced activities, there are some specific knowledge that is not explicitly described in the event log. To find some of the necessary knowledge, this study extracts knowledge from the event log, by using process mining. Heuristic miner algorithm was implemented in this study, because this algorithm has advantages compared to other methods, such as the ability to calculate the frequency of the process, to handle noise, and to combine the frequency between events and trace in the event log to build a process model. The steps being taken in this study began with the discovery process, followed by conformance checking, and completed with process model extension in enhancement step, which was finding knowledge based on analysing process model and event log. This study was using a specifically designed program to achieve the goals of this study. This study used VINST incident records with 149 cases consisting of 2.771 events. By applying heuristics miner, a process model discovered with precision, recall, and f-measure more than 96%. Knowledge gained from this process model extension were the analysis of time and organizational perspectives in forms of timestamp-impact attribute relation and originator-impact attribute relation.

Incident trend analysis is a practice where historical incident records and reports are investigated in order to identify patterns or trends in incident root causes. It is needed to prevent reoccurrence of incidents in order to improve the quality of service in ICT infrastructures. The research problem of this study is how quality of service could be improved by analysis of incidents with root causes related to human errors. Human error related root causes of IT service incidents are classified with the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) and also according to IT service management processes. 18 incident reports containing enough information to track the contributing conditions behind the harmful human act were investigated. As a result, three major types of sequences of events were identified. These event sequences describe error pathways leading to the active failure. By combining two categorization models, HFACS and ITSM processes, in a two dimensional matrix, we found that that most of the error pathways were related to change planning.

The amount of real-time user-generated content about disasters and large scale incidents increases drastically. However, this valuable information source is hardly used by relief organizations for improving emergency response. Currently, relief organizations have no support in filtering and aggregating the overwhelming flood of information. We provide a solution for structuring and merging user-generated content in disaster management, which allows identifying individual incidents in an incoming stream of incident reports. Reports on the same incident are merged using rules that exploit the spatial, temporal and thematic information that is provided in the report. This results in a condensed and easy to consume description of the incident. The thematic aspect is formalized via vocabularies and influences the spatial and temporal extension of the incident representation in our system. The solution is implemented as a client server application, with a mobile application for sending incident reports and a client application to process and store incidents.

This paper describes the development and prototypic implementation of a documentation system for IT incidents. A survey was conducted in order to obtain information on the current needs and likes of stakeholders involved in IT security. The outcome of this survey was used to create a documentation approach, based on best practices, which is able to create contexts between information assets over long periods of times. Additionally, a prototype of this approach was implemented, showing the basic idea of computational assistance during the documentation of IT incidents. Hereby, orchestration and information retrieval methods were applied for saving efforts for the employees involved and supporting adaptability of the resulting system. The resulting documentation will be assisting in IT security management, hence offering a valuable source for IT investigators by enriching the chain of evidence with information on relationships between assets and incidents.

There is a push in the enterprise towards facilitating processes from best practice frameworks (such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)) to make them more repeatable, efficient and cost-effective. Best practice processes provide descriptive, high level guidelines rather than prescriptive, precise process model definitions. They are meant to be followed by people and may be adapted and enacted differently in various realizations. Currently, ITIL processes are either supported by tools that hard code an interpretation of the process logic, or followed by people using productivity tools. This is inefficient because existing tools hardcode a rigid logic of the processes, and do not support collaborative and flexible realizations of processes. Moreover, there is a risk of information loss when people using rigid productivity tools, and are forced to collaborate outside of those tools. In this paper, we present a conversation-centered approach and a tool that enables dynamic and flexible definition and enactment of best practice processes in a collaborative and interactive manner. We address the issue of information loss by using the concept of a conversation as a container of information about the interactions among people in the context of a process. A conversation is backed with a semi-structured process model and process templates to support flexible and adaptive process realization. We showcase the approach using an illustrative use case in incident and problem management, based on best practice processes from ITIL.

IT is vital to business success or survival, IT provide not just technology but also a service. The objective of problem management is to minimize the impact of problems on the organization, which is an essential element for business service management. Supervised learning algorithms have been used for problem classification, but they rely on predefined classes and require each problem belongs to each category which sometimes is unreasonable. Moreover, with uncertainty, they may lead to poor quality. This paper proposes an uncertain fuzzy clustering problem classification approach based on partition. It does not rely on predefined classes and class-labeled training examples and allows that one problem can belongs to two or more categories by using fuzzy analysis and this approach use the expected sum of squared errors (E(SSE)) as its objective function instead of the sum of squared errors (SSE) to reduce uncertainty of data. This approach is unsupervised and automatic and is accurater than the others.

In recent years, emergency management of public incidents has become a new subject, to which the governments all over the world and the international society as a whole have paid much attention. Also it is being placed more importance in the field of public management than ever before. Even so, what the relevant researches have achieved is quite poor. There exists no such perfect framework for theoretic analysis. And on the other hand, a good interaction between the government agencies and research institutes has not been formed. Therefore, it is essential and also urgent to seek an adaptable emergency management system both in theories and in practices. Moreover, SARS and the significant public incidents having occurred in China this year have posed new requirements on emergency management system. This paper, on the basis of summarizing the current research results concerning emergency management, suggests an all-round management system which covers such concepts as whole-process management, multi-system management, all-round emergency response, multi-means management and all-social-staff management of public incidents. This paper also argues that it is essential to form a dynamic assessment and improvement mechanism for emergency management, based on which a breakthrough is expected to be achieved. A special monitoring agency should be established to conduct a periodic assessment on the integrated capability of all-round emergency management, so that the problems and weaknesses can be recognized in time and the emergency management system be perfected continuously.

There is a significant number of IT failures per year because parts fail, products are used in ways they were not designed for, and humans make errors in using products. These failures result in incidents that product vendors service as a part of the warranty or contracts. Incidents incur significant costs for servicing them, including call centers, parts, and field engineers. Some of the major problems include lack of coherent incident information, leading to inaccurate service diagnosis and inability to forecast failures. At the same time, technology has evolved. Hardware is generally more reliable, failures are moving from hardware to firmware, software, and applications. The scale effect limits human operator engagement, prevents centralized approaches, and expands automation. Traditional ways of handling incidents are not appropriate any more.In this paper we present a set of tools and approaches that enable unified serviceability with self-healing, automated learning, and an analysis engine. Unified serviceability with self-healing results in clean incident data and it reduces criticality of incidents into deferred maintenance. Automated learning produces empirically proven actionable knowledge enabling cost reduction of automated incident resolution. Using clean data and actionable knowledge, the analysis engine helps predict failures and determine trends, resulting in preventive maintenance. Collectively, preventive and deferred maintenance and automated incident service significantly reduce the costs. This way we have aligned incidents cost with the technology trends.

In recent years, IT Service Management (ITSM) has become one of the most researched areas of IT. Incident and Problem Management are two of the Service Operation processes in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). These two processes aim to recognize, log, isolate and correct errors which occur in the environment and disrupt the delivery of services. Incident Management and Problem Management form the basis of the tooling provided by an Incident Ticket Systems (ITS).

Knowledge management plays an important role in customer support processes such as incident management and problem management. Knowledge-oriented approach on customer support provides an IT organization with several benefits including faster incident resolution times and better identification of systematic incidents. Unfortunately, little attention has focused on examining challenges in customer support from the knowledge management perspective. In this study, the research question is: what kind of knowledge management challenges can arise in customer support. A case study method was used as a research method. Several knowledge management-related challenges were found, such as challenges in documenting incident resolutions and classifying incidents, a lack of public knowledge base and the missing knowledge flow for urgent incidents.

An incident management process is performed by the service desk that acts as contact point to the users and customers. The service desk records each incident (a failure report or a service request) reported by a user or a customer in the incident management system. Many IT organizations are interested in establishing an incident management system (IMS) that is compliant with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management framework. In this study, we aim to answer the research question is: what types of requirements should be taken account in building an incident management system. Lessons learned from a tool specification project in healthcare domain are presented. An effective IMS should be capable of handling incidents, service requests, problems and requests for change (RFCs); enable relating several incidents and RFCs to one problem; have a public known error database; and contain information on service level agreements.

The increasing complexity and dynamics in IT infrastructure and the emerging Cloud services present challenges to timely incident/problem diagnosis and resolution. In this paper we present a problem determination platform with multi-dimensional knowledge integration (e.g. configuration data, system vital data, log data, related tickets) and enablement for efficient incident and problem management of the enterprise. Three features of the platform are discussed: automated ticket classification, the automated association of resource with tickets based on integration with configuration database, and the collection of the system vitals relevant to the ticket through integration with monitoring systems. In response to the emerging Cloud services and their highly dynamic service operation context, we identify the need for a proactive service management approach which incorporates configurations and deployment of incident management tools, policies, and templates throughout the service life cycle in order to enable effective and efficient incident management in service operation.

Problem management is a critical and expensive element for delivering IT service management and touches various levels of managed IT infrastructure. While problem management has been mostly reactive, recent work is studying how to leverage large problem ticket information from similar IT infrastructures to probatively predict the onset of problems. Because of the sheer size and complexity of problem tickets, supervised learning algorithms have been the method of choice for problem ticket classification, relying on labeled (or pre-classified) tickets from one managed infrastructure to automatically create signatures for similar infrastructures. However, where there are insufficient preclassified data, leveraging human expertise to develop classification rules can be more efficient. In this paper, we describe a rule-based crowdsourcing approach, where experts can author classification rules and a social networkingbased platform (called xPad) is used to socialize and execute these rules by large practitioner communities. Using real data sets from several large IT delivery centers, we demonstrate that this approach balances between two key criteria: accuracy and cost effectiveness.

Organizations face increasing challenges in addressing and preventing computer and network security incidents. There are financial consequences from security incidents. These include lost time and resources used during recovery, possible theft of personal and/or proprietary information, and reputational damage that may negatively impact stock prices or reduce consumer confidence in a company. Being able to understand and predict trends in computer and network security incidents can aid an organization with resource allocation for prevention of such incidents, as well as evaluation of mitigation strategies. We look at using time series models with a large set of security incident data. We examine appropriateness of the data for modeling and consider needed transformations. Parameter search and model selection criteria are discussed. Then, forecasts from time series models are compared to forecasts from Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) software reliability growth (SRG) models.

Efficient emergency response to traffic incidents is crucial for the purpose of saving lives and properties, eliminating the impact to the smooth flow of traffic. In this paper, a software platform to design and implement a computer-aided emergency management system capable of reacting to traffic incidents in due time is described. We format the information flow of handling with emergencies. This system is divided into four parts, Incident Assessment System, Plan Database System, Scene Information Display System based on GIS and Resource Allocation and Management System. Our focus is to develop a plan generated system dynamically for actions and resources adapting to a changing environment through its action plan database. Scene Information Display System based on GIS and Incident Assessment System are also discussed in details. Key challenges in system design are also addressed. Simulation results show the efficiency of the system.

It may not be enough to develop mature processes at the back-end support level. Other strongly collaborating front-end support processes may substantially undermine them. For this reason, we have created CM3: front-end problem management - a detailed problem management process model to be utilised at the front-end support level. In this paper, we present the CM3 maturity levels at the front-end support and match them against the industrial state of practice within 15 software organisations. Our goal is to establish the current status of support maturity using CM3: front-end problem management. Our results show that the industrial processes studied suffice to provide basic problem management support at the front-end support level. However, only two out of 15 organisations studied have almost achieved the highest maturity level.

IT service providers need a systematic problem management model to handle problems in IT services effectively. However, many IT organizations have difficulties in establishing a problem management model that is suitable for a service-oriented business. This is due to complex IT service management standards that include a large number of new concepts, which partly overlap whith those of traditional software engineering. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model which clarifies the concepts within IT service problem management, and connects these concepts to traditional software engineering tasks, such as testing and defect management. A design pattern is used to document our model. This study has been carried out in co-operation with IT companies and their customers in the electricity domain in Finland.

We have created a process model for managing corrective maintenance requests at the front-end support level. Our model is called CM^3: Front-End Problem Management. It was elicited at two ABB organisations and refined at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and Scandinavian Airline Systems. In this paper, we evaluate it on a major scale using feedback from 15 major software organisations. The evaluation results show that CM^3: Front-End Problem Management appropriately mirrors the industrial reality.

Despite its importance, the process for emergency corrective maintenance has received very little attention. Today, we do not have any standard process models for handling emergency situations. The only models that have been defined can be found within the industry. In this paper, we outline an emergency corrective maintenance process model and evaluate its applicability to manage the new technology systems, the Web service systems. Our model has been elicited at Scandinavian airline systems (SAS). It provides a basis for developing a more detailed model of emergency corrective maintenance process - CM/sup 3/: emergency problem management.

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach for preventing railway operation incidents, which helps railway operation professionals explore opportunities for dispatch quality improvement. The approach consists of two processors: incident analysis and dispatch advisory. Given a specific operation incident description, the proposed approach enables the identification of underlying problems in the incident and the suggestion of appropriate dispatch strategies that can be implemented to prevent repetitions of similar incidents. Case-based reasoning (CBR) and rule-based reasoning (RBR) are applied to generate dispatch strategies by adapting ones applied to previous incidents and/or using generalised rule-based knowledge for dispatch.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of problem management in DSS. This study proposes a knowledge-based approach to design a problem manager that acts as an in-charge for the entire problem solving process. The required functionality of the problem manager is also outlined. The model is then applied to investment portfolio optimization problems, which are chosen as a problem domain. The prototype problem manager and the required user interface is developed in PROLOCr and Visual BASIC, respectively. The issues involved in the design and development of the prototype are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with the suggestions for the future research directions.

Identification and specification belong to the initial stages of problem management. Traditionally, creative methods in these phases have not been considered a part of a computer scientist's expertise or skills. For innovative systems, however, it is crucial that computer experts have a stronger contribution in formulating and even recognizing problems. Managing a problem up to its solution as a software product is a long process that needs creativity and flexibility. Thus, in addition to the basic elements of computer science curriculum, namely knowledge and skills, also training at attitudinal level is required. A dedicated course in creative problem management as a combination of these elements. Preliminary feedback of a pilot course indicates that the course increased students' motivation and supported their self-image as creative agents.