AHP evaluation of rigorous and agile IT service design-building phases-workflows in data centers.

The design-building of IT services in data centers has been historically conducted by applying rigorous IT service design-building phases-workflows. Consequently, relevant research has been conducted upon these rigorous phases-workflows to provide theoretical foundations and practical guidance to IT service design-building architects. However, the current dynamic business-governmental environment is demanding agile approaches, and research from this perspective is still very scarce. This research, thus, aims to provide an updated review and quantitative evaluation of the main rigorous (ITIL v2011, CMMI-SVC v1.3, and ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018) and main agile (ITIL v4, VeriSM, and ISO/IEC 29110-4-3) IT service design-building phases-workflows. For this aim, we conduct a conceptual review research methodology enhanced with an analytics hierarchical process (AHP) method to assess quantitatively how well these six IT service design-building phases-workflows fit two theoretical expected rigorous and agile IT service design-building phases-workflows pro formas. We found that the ITIL v2011 and CMMI-SVC v1.3 phases-workflows fit the rigorous pro forma with a high level, and the ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 fits a moderate level, whereas all these three ones fit a low level the agile pro forma, as it was expected. ITIL v4 and VeriSM were found to fit a high level the agile pro forma but the ISO/IEC 29110-4-3 fits a moderate level. Unexpectedly, ITIL v4 and the ISO/IEC 29110-4-3 fit a moderate and moderate levels the rigorous pro forma, but VeriSM fits a low level as it was expected. Hence, we can conclude that ITIL v4 and VeriSM provide the most agile IT service design-building phase-workflow, and CMMI-SVC v1.3 the most rigorous one. The ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 and ISO/IEC 29110-4-3 standards are still aligned to the rigorous approach, and ITIL v4 exhibits a dual moderate rigorous and high agile profile. Hence, this research provides ITSM professionals with an updated analysis useful to guide the selection and application of the IT service design-building phase-workflow—rigorous or agile one—in data centers. This research also contributes to the IT service design-building literature with updated insights and proposes specific research avenues to advance our scientific knowledge on how to design-building IT services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]