Using Maturity Models in ArchiMate for Implementing ITIL
Using Maturity Models in ArchiMate for
Implementing ITIL
64823 - Nuno Silva
nuno.miguel@ist.utl.pt
Advisor: Prof. Miguel Mira da Silva
Co-Advisor: Prof. Pedro Sousa
Departamento de Informática
Instituto Superior Técnico
Abstract.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the de facto standard for
implementing IT Service Management inside organizations. It uses methods and
practices that describe how a service should be managed in order to achieve maximum
efficiency and effectiveness. However most organizations struggle with its
implementation and that leads to a waste of resources, high costs and effort. There have
been studies and research works that have proposed maturity models for ITIL with the
purpose of facilitating the implementation of ITIL inside organizations.
Nowadays, organizations need to specify the components and its relationships used to
manage and align assets, people, operations and projects that support business goals and
strategies concerning them. That is the main goal of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and
of the EA modeling language ArchiMate.
By connecting both the ITIL and EA approaches with ITIL maturity models,
organizations could ease their efforts in implementing ITIL and maximize the overall
costs and resources, therefore becoming more mature, effective and efficient. Our goal
is to use these ITIL maturity models (focusing on a specific one) in ArchiMate for
implementing ITIL inside organizations. The demonstration of this work will be its
application on a field study at Hospital Santa Maria IT Department focusing on the
ITIL Incident Management process. For evaluating our proposal we shall evaluate our
demonstration, use interviews, the Moody and Shanks framework, and the Wand and
Weber ontological method.
Keywords: IT Service Management, ITIL, Enterprise Architecture, ArchiMate,
Maturity Model, TIPA, metamodel
1 Introduction
Throughout the years, IT suffered a transformation from being a traditional
orientation of administrative support to a strategic role where business and IT posed a
major concern [1]. The Henderson’s strategic alignment model presented several
perspectives on how to integrate the business and IT domains, proposing concepts like
information systems service organizations and IT governance [2]. Focusing on the IT
Governance, more specifically, on the IT alignment, two approaches have had major
relevance: IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) [1].
IT Service Management (ITSM) evolved naturally as services became underpinned in
time by the developing technology. In its early years, IT was mainly focused on
application development, but as time went by, new technologies meant concentrating
on delivering the created applications as a part of a larger service offering, supporting
the business itself [3].
ITIL [4] is the de facto standard for implementing ITSM [5]. It is a practical, nononsense approach to the identification, planning, delivery and support of IT services
to the business [6]. The ITIL Core consists of five publications: Service Strategy,
Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service
Improvement. Each book covers a phase from the Service Lifecycle and encompasses
various processes which are always described in detail in the book in which they find
their key application [7].
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models
that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise’s organizational structure,
business processes, information systems, and infrastructure [8].
More than 100 IT management maturity models have been proposed since 1973.
Nonetheless, due to the generality of most of them, they are neither well defined nor
documented. The Process Maturity Framework (PMF) is the only maturity model
specifically proposed for ITIL v2. Nevertheless it only consists of 6 pages which is
unthinkable to even considering using this model for evaluation and implementation
purposes concerning ITIL inside organizations [18].
TIPA, [9] (Tudor’s ITSM Process Assessment) is the result of 8 years of research
work, including experimentation on combining ITIL with the ISO/IEC 15504
(Process Assessment Standard) that resulted in a framework to measure maturity
levels of organizations based on ITIL. TIPA is a standards-based approach to ITIL
(“v3”) assessment that can address the challenges (posed by improving the quality of
product manufacture or of IT processes) in several important ways, by providing a
repeatable, consistent method for conducting process assessment [9].
Many organizations have tried to implement ITIL. However, most of them tend to
struggle with its implementation due to organizational challenges such as staff
resistance to change, task conflicts and ambiguous orders leading to high efforts and
costs [30]. ITIL Maturity Models like the one proposed by Pereira [18] or TIPA [9]
are frameworks that, if used correctly and well understood, can help organizations in
successfully and correctly implementing ITIL.
Hence, our proposal is to use an instantiation of an ITIL Maturity model in ArchiMate
to help organizations implement ITIL. Roughly speaking, we propose the creation of
an ITIL Maturity Model metamodel in ArchiMate. With the implementation of this
metamodel, we plan to establish the bridge between the EA elements of an
organization and Vicente’s ITIL representation in ArchiMate [1] as means of
representing maturity levels in and Enterprise Architecture directly and also to help
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reducing the effort, costs and resource expenses due to ITIL implementation inside
organizations.
To demonstrate our proposal we will be doing a field study which will be held at the
IT Department of the Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon, Portugal where we’ll use Link
Consulting’s EA tool - EAMS to implement our proposal and validating it with the
help of the IT Department’s EA and Vicente’s ITIL representation in ArchiMate. For
validation purposes, we will be focusing on representing the ITIL Incident
Management, mainly because it is a process that is always present in all IT
Departments and therefore, from all the ITIL processes, this would be the most
interesting to represent.
The evaluation of our proposal will consist of the evaluation of our demonstration,
interviews to experts in the area such as ITIL Certified Experts and the IT
Department’s Director and Staff in order to evaluate and validate our proposal as well
as the use of the Moody and Shanks framework [10] for model quality management
and the Wand and Weber [28] ontological analysis method to evaluate our concept
mappings from our maturity model elements to ArchiMate’s.
The following sections of this report follow the six steps of Design Science Research
Methodology explained in the next section. The Research Problem and Related Work
sections cover aims and objectives regarding the awareness and recognition of a nonspecific problem from a state of the art review that brings us important issues that
must be addressed. Afterwards, the Research Proposal section presents a proposal as
an attempt to solve the previously defined problem. Next the Demonstration section
describes how the proposal will be put into practice and also a brief description of the
work already done regarding the problem’s solution. We finish this project report with
the Evaluation section comparing the results with the research questions and
describing the conclusions in the Conclusions section.
2 Research Methodology
The methodology to be applied across this thesis is Design Science Research (DSRM)
where we develop and validate a proposal to solve our problem [11]. It is an iterative
research process composed of six steps: problem identification and motivation,
definition of the objectives for a solution, design and development, demonstration,
evaluation, and communication [12]. Its goal is to overcome standard research
methodologies, such as traditional descriptive research and interpretative research,
whose research outputs are mostly explanatory and, arguably, not often applicable to
the solution of problems encountered in research and practice [12]. DSRM
accomplishes this by designing and creating an explicitly applicable solution to a
problem, being an accepted research paradigm in the area of engineering [12].
Information Systems is considered an applied research discipline where we often
apply theory from other disciples, such as economics, computer science, social
3
A field study (IT
Dept. at Santa
Maria Hospital)
where we shall
use an EA tool
to validate our
proposal
Evaluation
a) Demonstration
of the Proposal
b) Interviews to
experts in the area
c) Wand and
Weber ontological
method
Disciplinary Knowledge
Representation
of an ITIL
maturity model
in ArchiMate
(TIPA
Metamodel)
Demonstration
Metrics, Analysis, Knowledge
Design &
Development
How to knowledge
How to ease
the effort of
implementing
ITIL in
organizations?
Define
objectives of a
solution
Provide easier
alternatives to
use ITIL
maturity
models in ITIL
implementation
inside
organizations
by means of
their EA
Theory
Identify
problem &
motivate
Inference
sciences, among others, in order to solve problems at the intersection of IT and
organizations [12]. The integration of design as a major component of research has
been successfully accomplished by several researchers with the goal of solving
relevant organization problems [12].
Communication
Use this thesis
and publish
one or more
articles to
communicate
the artefacts,
its value and
utility
d) Moodys and
Shanks framework
Fig. 1. The DSRM process (adapted from [12])
DSRM proposes the design and development followed by a demonstration and
evaluation of artifacts that may include constructs (vocabulary and symbols), models
(abstractions and representations), methods (algorithms and practices) and
instantiations (implemented and prototype systems) [11]. The main focus of this
thesis will be in the creation of a model and an instantiation of that model. In Fig. 1
we map the DSRM steps to our work.
The following chapters follow the methodology's steps those being: "Problem
Identification" and "Related Work" whose aim is to raise recognition and awareness
of a problem from a state of the art review giving us the main issues that must be
addressed. Following, "Proposal" presents an attempt to solve the previously
described problem. Afterwards, we present a "Demonstration" that is followed by the
"Evaluation" where we compare the results obtained by designing, implementing and
applying our solution to the research questions, concluding with our proposal
applicability and themes for future work.
3 Research Problem
This section describes the “Identify problem & motivate” step of the DSRM process,
where we come to realize and recognize a problem from a state of the art review,
giving us issues that require our attention and must be addressed.
Organizations nowadays tend to become more and more service-oriented towards
their clients. IT frameworks offer a set of best practices for better efficiency,
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effectiveness and maturity of their business and are constantly addressed in the area of
IT Service Management. There is no doubt that the ITIL framework is ITSM’s de
facto standard and these companies usually struggle with its implementation due to
organizational challenges such as staff resistance, task conflicts and ambiguous orders
that lead to high efforts and costs [30].
Many organizations already tried to implement ITIL; however, they came up with a
set of practical issues that caused that implementation to fail. Those reasons [30]
were:
1.
Lack of management commitment: without management commitment we
can only hopefully achieve isolated wins that will be few and far between.
2. Spending too much time on complicated process diagrams: in the first
steps of ITIL implementation there is a great temptation of producing
complex process maps. Nevertheless, for most processes they are unnecessary
and result in wastes of time and resources.
3. Not creating work instructions: Some organizations fail to establish written
work and therefore, the creation of complex process maps is futile. It is better
to have written, published and continually reviewed work instructions.
4. Not assigning process owners: Most of the IT departments are silo-based but
not ITIL. ITIL is process-based so, a process owner should be assigned to
each ITIL process that crosses those silos. The owners should have a
complete process vision and monitoring and not worry about staffing or other
departmental issues.
5. Concentrating too much on performance: Organizations focus too much on
achieving best performance and ignore the importance of quality and
processes.
6. Being too ambitious: Organizations attempt to implement all the ITIL
processes at once and it causes confusion, staff unrest, and poor integration
between the processes.
7. Failing to maintain momentum: The estimated period for ITIL
implementation is three to five years and demands a huge effort to implement
all of its processes in the target organization. The implementation process
should be continuous and even if the rewards of ITIL come in early stages,
the organizations should not lose the momentum.
8. Allowing departmental demarcation: Some of the ITIL processes are cross
departments and that sometimes generates conflicts, especially when there are
rigid department boundaries.
9. Ignoring solutions other than ITIL: ITIL is not the holy grail of ITSM. It is
the de facto standard of ITSM but sometimes organizations need to adapt to
other frameworks in order to achieve their needs like ISO 20000 or COBIT.
10. Ignoring reviewing of the ITIL every time: Implementing ITIL is very
important but only if the best practices are maintained in the organizations.
Audit is therefore very important in the organization from time to time.
11. Not memorizing ITIL books self: ITIL cannot be implemented with some
paper based instructions without any attend to target organization. It can only
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be successfully implemented by understanding how those best practices
apply, based on target organization’s IT strengths and abilities.
After understanding all the practical problems organizations face nowadays in
implementing ITIL, we should look to the other side of the coin: how organizations
represent themselves, their elements and relations amongst them. As Vicente says in
is work, EA principles remain the best way to represent organizations as a system, by
relating multiple architectures to their artifacts and components, the scope of ITIL
also involves those architectures but it does not describe how to design and realize the
whole organization [1].
We concluded from Vicente’s work that EA and ITIL are strongly related and
therefore we believe that within this relation lies a solution to help reducing the
efforts and costs, as well as eliminating all the above practical problems of ITIL
implementation. This approach could then lead the organizations to achieve better
maturity, efficiency and effectiveness of their businesses.
From all the attempts in relating maturity models and ITIL, Tudor [9] excelled in
approaching the relations between Process Assessment and ITIL to provide a
framework of Process Assessment in an 8-year research work called TIPA that
describes how to increase the maturity level of organizations processes and make
them compliant with ITIL. Nevertheless, those metrics are extensively documented
and can lead once again to the practical problem of emphasizing paper instructions
too much. Furthermore, TIPA does not relate its criteria to how the EA of the
organization should adapt in order to achieve compliance with ITIL (which would be
a more interesting approach for companies to fully comprehend what changes need to
be done). Fig. 2 illustrates our problem.
Organization
Resources
Costs
Time
Effort
Fig. 2. Difficulty in ITIL implementation inside organizations
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All things considered, we define our problem as the difficulty in implementing ITIL
inside organizations with less costs, effort, time and resources.
4 Related Work
In this section we present a literature review of the main concepts and areas of
research related to this project. We start by introducing the IT Infrastructure Library
(ITIL), a best practice model to IT Service Management.
Afterwards, we will present the work that has been done regarding ITL Maturity
Models showing as main examples Pereira’s ITIL Maturity Model and the ISO/IEC
15504 (Process Assessment Standard) by the Public Research Center Henri Tudor that
culminated in internationally-recognized framework for IT process assessment known
as TIPA.
In the third part of the Related Work section we will describe the concepts of
Enterprise Architecture (EA), a framework that is used worldwide that represents
organizations and also the standard modeling language that provides a uniform
representation of the organization’s EA as well as its motivation extension finishing
with Vicente’s work of representing ITIL in ArchiMate.
Finally, we conclude the Related Work section with a brief summary explaining why
none of these researches solve our research problem.
4.1 ITIL
Enterprises need to manage the delivery of services that support users in conducting
their activities in the context of business processes [13]. ITIL was created by the
Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), an office of the British
government and was first released to the public in the late eighties [14]. ITIL is a
common-practice model possessing the character of a branch standard [15]. While the
first version was mainly based on experience in data centers running big mainframes,
in 2000 a revised version (ITIL v2) was launched becoming the worldwide de facto
standard for IT Service Management [14].
In 2007, ITIL V3 introduced the lifecycle principle, whereby the provisioning of
services was considered to be a continuous process in which new services are brought
into existence whilst others are phased out [14]. The current version of ITIL covers
the major weaknesses identified in the previous versions, namely being too focused
on technology [16]. Now, instead of focusing on the service itself, the focus lay on
this cycle of life, renewal and decommissioning of services, with a greater businessfocused perspective [14]. The ITIL Core consists of five publications: Service
Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual
Service Improvement. Each book covers a phase from the Service Lifecycle with
7
various processes which are always described in detail in the book in which they find
their key application [17].
Now, instead of focusing on the service itself, the focus lay on this cycle of life,
renewal and decommissioning of services, with a greater business-focused
perspective [14]. The ITIL Core consists of five publications: Service Strategy,
Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service
Improvement. Each book covers a phase from the Service Lifecycle with various
processes which are always described in detail in the book in which they find their
key application [7].
4.2 Maturity Models
Maturity Models are important in establishing high levels, goals and practices in the
organizational world. Some of those models are mainly focused on services (CMMI
for Services, ITSCMM), others on software (CMM, Trillium, Bootstrap) and there are
others that focus on ITIL (PMF, Pereira’s ITIL Maturity Model and TIPA) [35].
However, since our thesis focus is ITIL, we shall discuss in the next sections the two
main ITIL approaches concerning Maturity Models: Pereira’s ITIL Maturity Model
and TIPA.
Pereira’s ITIL Maturity Model.
As far as existing Maturity Models for ITIL are concerned, Pereira [18] proposed a
CMMI-based ITIL Maturity Model as a better option to the existing Process Maturity
Framework (PMF) specifically designed for ITIL v2. He defined maturity levels for
the Stage Model and for the Continuous Model, taking into consideration the chosen
model and the context of ITIL, and also the relation between the Stage Model and the
Continuous Model [18].
For the Continuous Model (better for organizations that already know which
processes want to implement and/or evaluate), he defined 5 levels of maturity and
used a questionnaire for process evaluation purposes composed of previously
validated ITSCMM and CMMI-SVC factors. However, he only had a questionnaire
for the ITIL’s Incident Management Process. Nevertheless, that questionnaire was
used and tested, as means of evaluating the process, in two Portuguese organizations
[18].
For the Stage Model (better for organizations that don’t know where to start regarding
ITIL implementation), he also defined 5 levels of maturity. The attribution of a level
of maturity to an ITIL process was done based on the compatibility between the
processes purpose and the description of the Stage Model’s maturity levels. For
example, the Incident Management Process is related with customer’s satisfaction
therefore, is grouped in level 2, whereas Service Measurement or Knowledge
Management are related with information management and how it is measurement so
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the go to Stage Management’s maturity level 4. The same line of thought is applied to
the remaining processes [18].
By relating both Models, Pereira concluded that they are not completely independents
of one another. When an organization follows the Continuous Model is because it
already knows which processes are to be implemented or evaluated. However, if the
organization does not know which processes to implement first, they will probably
follow the Stage Model to know it. Concluding, an organization that wants to start
implementing ITIL, by following Pereira’s Maturity Model, will start by using the
Stage Model and then the Continuous Model to evaluate and/or implement the
processes [18]. Fig. 3 illustrates Pereira’s Maturity Model.
Fig. 3. Pereira’s Maturity Model (from [18])
TIPA.
Although Pereira’s work [18] proved to have some pros, such as being extremely
necessary given the reality of ITIL’s implementation worldwide, less error prone in
implementing ITIL correctly in the organizations and giving the organizations the
knowledge of where they are and what they need to do to achieve full maturity,
effectiveness and efficiency, it is nevertheless a master’s thesis and therefore, does
not have the financial and timing effort of a real research theme.
TIPA (Tudor’s ITSM Process Assessment) is the result of 8 years of research work,
including experimentation on combining ITIL with the ISO/IEC 15504 (Process
Assessment Standard). TIPA is a standard ds-based approach to ITIL (“v3”)
assessment that can address the challenges (posed by improving the quality of product
manufacture or of IT processes) in several important ways, by providing a repeatable,
9
consistent method for conducting process assessment [9]. Fig. 4 illustrates the Process
Assessment Model that maps the base practices of ITIL v3 with the generic
practices of ISO 15504.
PROCESS ASSESSMENT MODEL
Base Practices:
Generic Practices:
INC.BP1: Define and agree on incident
categories and priorities (…)
INC.BP1: Define, agree and communicate
timescales for all incident-handling stages. (..)
INC.BP3: Detect and log the incidents (…)
…
GP 2.1.1 Identify process performance objectives
GP 2.2.2 Plan and monitor process performance
GP 2.1.3 Adjust performance of the process to
meet plans
GP 2.1.4 Define responsibilities and authorities
for performing the process
…
Process performance indicators
Process capability indicators
Work Products
Inputs/Outputs
Generic Work Products
Generic Resources
Process Dimension
Capability Dimension
ITIL v3
ISO 15504
Process Reference Model
Process Capability Levels
Fig. 4. TIPA’s Process Assessment Model (from [9])
A TIPA assessment provides more than just a simple determination of process
maturity. It pinpoints the current level of maturity a given process has achieved and
calls out specific deficiencies which, if corrected, would advance the process to
achievement of the desired level of maturity [9].
When doing a TIPA assessment, a baseline assessment is conducted to get a very
clear, objective understanding of where the organization is right now as basis for
sound improvement planning [9]. During the entire process confidentiality is a key
point in obtaining accurate insightful information regarding the organization. The
results of the baseline assessment are used to create a roadmap for improvements,
which are driven forward by properly prepared process leaders. The skills to monitor
and improve specific processes are easily acquired [9]. Fig. 5 shows us the
Assessment progression of a TIPA assessor.
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Baseline TIPA Assessment
Performed by objective Improvements based on assessment
external assessors.
Train enterprise assessors
Performed on select
high-value processes.
Results used to plan
improvements.
Improvements implemented as
identified from baseline
assessment.
Meanwhile, suitable internal
assessors are identified and
trained.
(candidates should be ITIL
Experts and then trained in
TIPA assessment techniques)
Follow-up assessments
Alternating internal
and external
assessments.
Identify next
improvements and
implement.
Re-baseline every two
years.
Fig. 5. TIPA’s Assessment Progression (from [9])
The process improvement is an approach that is time consuming and can take a great
amount of time mainly because there are many inter-dependencies between the ITIL
processes. For example, change assessment (part of the change management) relies on
accurate configuration data, and accurate configuration data is heavily influenced by
clearly defined services, etc. So it can be very difficult to increase process maturity in
one process if a related process is missing key elements [9].
Another challenge to process improvement is that organizations are often fragmented,
with multiple service provider types within the IT organization each with selfcontained processes. Viewed independently, there could conceivably be relatively
high levels of process capability and maturity. But the business usually views IT as a
single entity, which often calls for a standard set of ITSM processes across the
organization [9]. Fig. 6 illustrates the maturity level hierarchy from both the Instance
and the Organization views.
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Fig. 6. TIPA’s Maturity Level Hierarchy (from [9])
The goal of any organization that relies in these assessments is to obtain the top
maturity level possible, therefore, in a perfect world each process would be at level 5
of maturity. After all, one of the primary goals of ITSM is to continually improve the
quality of service delivered and mature processes should help ensure service quality.
Realistically, however, this may not always align with business priorities.
Improvement might be defined as doing more with less, continuously leading by
innovation, or any other definition that best addresses the needs of the enterprise.
Business-driven decision-making and strategy definition is the key [9].
Achieving operational excellence and ultimately distinctive performance will require
effective and efficient process across the service lifecycle. A standards-based
approach to assessing process maturity can provide a repeatable, vendor natural, and
structured approach to assessment. The results will include return on IT investments,
less re-work as a result of improved prioritization of improvement initiatives, and cost
reduction as processes mature based on business drivers [9].
4.3 Enterprise Architecture
The Zachman Framework [19] appeared in the late 1980s with the goal of defining
logical constructs (architectures) to represent organizations. It is based on the
principle that an organization doesn’t have just one architecture, but a set of them,
arranged as layers. Each of these layers produce artifacts that answer six
organizational questions (What, Where, When, Why, Who, How) [19].
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Today, business performance depends on a balanced and integrated design of the
enterprise, involving people, their competencies, organizational structures, business
processes, IT, finances, products, and services, as well as its environment [20]. EA is
a coherent set of principles, involving the design and performance of different
architectures. It specifies the components and its relationship, which are used to
manage and align assets, people, operations and projects to support business goals and
strategies [8][21], concerning those properties of an enterprise that are necessary and
sufficient to meet its essential requirements [20].
EA is based on a holistic representation of organizations, on views and the ability to
map relationship between artifacts, and on the independence and connection between
artifacts and architectures, and on the independence and connection between layered
architectures [22] which usually are [8][19]: Business, Process, Application,
Information, and Technology. The alignment between architectures allows a coherent
blueprint of the organization, which is then used for governance of its processes and
systems [23].
ArchiMate.
The ArchiMate EA modeling language was developed to provide a uniform
representation for architecture descriptions [24][25]. It offers an integrated
architecture approach that describes and visualizes the different architecture domains
and their underlying relationships and dependencies [24][25]. The goal of the
ArchiMate project is to provide domain integration through an architecture language
and visualization techniques that picture these domains and their relations, providing
the architect with instruments that support and improve the architecture process [26].
In a short time, ArchiMate has become the open standard for architecture modeling in
the Netherlands; it is now also becoming well known in the international EA
community, being today a TOG standard [24].
The domains of business, application and infrastructure are connected by a service
orientation paradigm, where each layer exposes functionality in the form of a service
to the layer above [17]. Besides this, it also distinguishes between active structure,
behavior and passive structure elements, having also another distinction between
internal and external system view. On top of this, ArchiMate is a formal visual design
language, supports different viewpoints for selected stakeholders and is flexible
enough to be easily extended [17]. Fig. 7 illustrates the ArchiMate generic
metamodel, consisting of its core concepts and respective relations.
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Fig. 7. Generic Metamodel: The Core Concepts of ArchiMate (from [31])
ArchiMate Motivation Extension.
Motivational concepts are used to model the motivations, or reasons, that underlie the
design or change of some enterprise architecture. These motivations influence, guide,
and constrain the design [31]. Fig. 8 illustrates the ArchiMate Motivation Extension
Metamodel.
Fig. 8. The ArchiMate Motivation Extension Metamodel (from [31])
In this figure we have the ArchiMate Motivation Extension concepts and how they
related with each other. Drivers are factors that influence the motivational elements
and their source can be from either outside or inside the organization. The internal
drivers (concerns) are associated with another motivational concept: stakeholder.
Stakeholders can either be an individual or a group of human beings like a project
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team, an enterprise or a society [31]. Organizations usually undertake an assessment
of these drivers to decide whether existing intentions need to be adjusted or not.
The actual motivational concepts are represented by goals, principles, requirements,
and constraints. Goals represent a desired result, or end that a stakeholder wants to
achieve. Principles and requirements represent desired properties of solutions or
means to realize the above said goals. Principles are normative guidelines that guide
the design of all possible solutions in a given context, whereas requirements represent
formal statements of need, expressed by stakeholders that must be met by the
architecture or solutions [31].
ITIL in ArchiMate.
Vicente approached the concept of integrating EA and ITIL and went more far than
anyone else in this area by successfully defining an EA specification in ArchiMate
that uses ITIL principles, methods, processes and concepts to perform IT Service
Management, and general EA principles, methods and models to the design and
realization of the remaining organizational structure [3]. Vicente had already defined
this architecture’s motivation model, its drivers, assessments, goals, requirements and
principles [27], and so he would continue his work on representing the architecture,
on modeling ITIL components and relationships according to the EA approach and
the ITIL principles, constraining the organization’s freedom of design [3].
One of the problems that Vicente noticed was the fact that having two different
frameworks to approach governance can lead to several setbacks. In a time when
organizations strive to be efficient and effective, it seems counterintuitive to be
wasting resources by having different organizational departments or teams handling
both approaches independently. In fact, while enterprise architects are designing
organizations based on EA principles and trying to align business and information
systems, its IT departments are using ITIL to design and manage IT services. This is
being done in closed silos, where the architect knows little about how ITIL is being
used on the IT departments, increasing the gap between business and IT, strategy and
functional integration [1].
Vicente had also realized from his research that because ITIL content is based on
natural language descriptions, it lacks a formal notation and representation, what
sometimes led to different interpretations and discussion between practitioners.
Therefore, besides his work of integrating EA and ITIL aims to enhance ITIL with a
formal representation of concepts for knowledge sharing, stakeholder communication
and to aid discussion and validation by the ITIL community itself [3].
This approach, as Vicente demonstrates, has the goal of giving the architect the
elements and models to design specific organizations according to best practices,
which in this case is ITIL and ITSM [3] and could also become a tool to check for
compliance and maturity levels in particular organizations [3]. Fig. 9 illustrates
Vicente’s proposal.
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Fig. 9. Vicente’s Proposed Enterprise Architecture (from [1])
4.4 Summary
The state-of-the-art brings high contributions to the organizational scenario, but none
of them provide a solution to our problem of implementing ITIL in organizations and
therefore, the practical problems of its implementation still remains.
All organizations are composed by a set of elements and relations between those
elements that are represented in an Enterprise Architecture with the use of the
ArchiMate standard. But the Enterprise Architecture AS-IS cannot relate the
organizational changes that can be represented through that same EA with ITIL.
5 Research Proposal
In this section, by taking the research problem described above into consideration, we
propose using Maturity Models in ArchiMate for implementing ITIL. Throughout
this section we will focus on two important steps. In the first one, we will describe the
objectives of our solution. In the second step, we will briefly explain how the model
will be conceptualized and which knowledge and approaches we will use.
This sections correspond to the “Define objectives of a solution” (where we define
our goal as a method of facilitating the implementation of ITIL on ITSM-based
organizations using a framework of an ITIL Maturity Model instantiation and relating
it the organization’s Enterprise Architecture) and to the “Design and Development”
(where we present the process of designing and developing the ITIL Maturity Model
metamodel) steps of the DSRM process.
16
5.1 Objectives of the Solution
As we have seen, being compliant with ITIL provides a high organizational maturity,
effectiveness and efficiency inside any IT-driven organization.
Therefore, by modeling ITIL maturity in ArchiMate we are targeting two main goals.
First, taking advantage of the organization’s EA as a way of facilitating ITIL
implementation and as a way of proving the strong connection between EA and ITIL
like Vicente did in his work. Second, by having an ArchiMate representation of the
ITIL Maturity Model, we want to reduce the efforts, time, resources and costs of ITIL
implementation.
With that said, our main objective is to check for ITIL compliance inside
organizations but mainly to help organizations achieve in an incremental way
effectiveness, efficiency and maturity by implementing ITIL with reduced
efforts, time, resources and costs.
5.2 Design and Development
As mentioned before, TIPA represents a maturity model for ITIL based on the
ISO/IEC 15504 (Process Assessment Standard) and for purposes of designing and
developing our proposal we shall use it as an instantiation of our ITIL maturity model.
Fig. 10 illustrates our proposal.
ISSO 15504
TIPA Metamodel
ArchiMate
ITIL
Fig. 10. TIPA metamodel in ArchiMate for help in ITIL
implementation
17
Figure 10 is divided into 3 main layers: the ISO 15504 layer, the TIPA layer which is
an instantiation of the ISO 15504 and finally the ITIL/ArchiMate layer where we
connect both approaches with our proposed TIPA metamodel. This figure also
illustrates in a top-down approach the sequence of steps that we are going to do
throughout the design and development of our proposal. We will first take into
consideration the ISO 15504 and more specifically the TIPA core concepts and their
relations that shall serve then as input for the creation of our TIPA metamodel in
ArchiMate.
With that said and to address the above mentioned objectives we will define the
development of our proposal in four basic steps.
1.
2.
3.
4.
In order to model any kind of universe, we must know which the elements
that compose that same universe are. Therefore, as first step, we will
identify all the concepts that define TIPA.
After identifying the TIPA concepts we need to acknowledge the fact of
whether or not those concepts are already possible of being modeled with
the existing ArchiMate concepts. In other words, we will need to create a
semantic mapping between the TIPA concepts and the ArchiMate’s
ones.
After concluding the mapping we can come to the conclusion that there
are no existing ArchiMate elements that can represent every TIPA
concept. That should not be the case since TIPA’s criteria nature relates
with the Business Motivation Model and ArchiMate already possesses an
extension of it. Although, if that scenario happens we need to propose a
new ArchiMate extension where we create new elements and relations
between them that will represent the TIPA concepts that cannot be
supported by the current ArchiMate version.
The final step will be the creation of a TIPA metamodel in ArchiMate
that can clearly represent all the TIPA elements and relations
amongst them.
There has been some work concerning the representation of frameworks and concepts
in ArchiMate like the capture of business strategy and value in EA [32][33], the
representation of KPIs in ArchiMate [34] and even Vicente’s work of representing
ITIL in ArchiMate [1].
6 Demonstration
This section describes the “Demonstration” step of the DSRM method, where we
demonstrate all the work done concerning our proposal. This section will be divided
in 2 main subsections: The work already done and the one yet to be done described in
the TIPA in EAMS section.
18
In the Work Done section, we will describe the work that has been done related to the
implementation of our proposal in Link Consulting’s EA tool - EAMS. That section is
divided in 2 sections: the implementation of Vicente’s work [1] in EAMS and the
surveys that have been done inside the IT Department of Santa Maria Hospital with
the purpose of modeling its EA. In the TIPA in EAMS section we will describe the
steps that are going to be done in the next phase of our thesis in order to conclude our
demonstration process.
6.1 Work Done
This section is divided in two sections where we explain the work that has been done
for demonstration and validation purposes of our proposal. In the Implementation of
Vicente’s Work we explain all the process of implementing Vicente’s proposal inside
the EAMS EA tool. In the IT Department’s Enterprise Architecture section we
describe the process of collecting information about Santa Maria Hospital IT
Department’s EA.
Implementation of Vicente’s Work.
Vicente’s work [1] proved to be an interesting topic that has a great resemblance and
connection with our proposal. Therefore, we’ve followed a first line of deploying all
his work to Link’s EAMS tool. Having an EA representation of ITIL will be really
useful when combining all the elements necessary for our demonstration.
Furthermore, the ITIL elements Vicente has modeled will be directly connected to our
TIPA’s ArchiMate representation of the Incident Management Assessment (chosen
TIPA process assessment for validation of our proposal) which will simplify our
demonstration process. Fig. 12 in the Appendix B Section shows Vicente’s work
realized in the EAMS tool for the Incident Management Process.
IT Department’s Enterprise Architecture.
After extending Vicente’s ArchiMate representation of ITIL into EAMS we entered in
contact with our field study target, the IT Department at Santa Maria Hospital. We
had a meeting with the director, Eng. João Louro and explained him the focus of our
thesis and how the department could benefit from using this approach in
implementing ITIL.
We started by installing our EAMS Database in a virtual server inside the department
that was then populated with all the collected data regarding their EA. Concerning the
collection of all their EA elements, we started by surveying their infrastructural and
application elements. Those were collected and populated inside the EAMS Database.
Fig. 13 in the Appendix B Section illustrates some of the Department’s applications
in the EAMS.
Afterwards, we started by surveying and modeling their business processes and
mapping them with ITIL. However, for our thesis main focus only the activities
19
related with the Incident Management process of ITIL were prioritized. Table 1
illustrates the surveyed activities related to the Help Desk area of the department and
how far they are from being compliant with the activities that compose the ITIL
Incident Management Process.
Activity
Incident Identification
Incident Logging
Incident Categorization
Incident Prioritization
Initial Diagnosis
Incident Escalation
Investigation and Diagnosis
Resolution and Recovery
Incident Closure
Implementation Status
Software: OTRS
Software: OTRS
Software: OTRS
Software: OTRS
Software: OTRS
Table 1. Compliance mapping between the IT Department’s Help
Desk Activities and ITIL Incident Management Process Activities
By analyzing Table 1 we came to the conclusion that the IT Department’s Help Desk
division is not far from having an automated implementation of the ITIL Incident
Management Process. Throughout the Incident process pipeline they use an open
source software application called OTRS that features most of the ITIL Incident
Management Activities. However, as we can see from the red implementation status
cells, the Department is not yet compliant with the Incident Categorization and
Incident Prioritization (both paid features of the OTRS system) and also with the
Initial Diagnosis and Investigation and Diagnosis activities.
6.2 TIPA in EAMS
In this section we will describe the work that is yet to be done concerning our
proposal demonstration and which approaches are we following towards its
conclusion.
After having our model implemented and validated, the next step will be the
realization of that model inside the EAMS tool. For sake of simplicity in the
demonstration of our proposal we will just consider the ITIL’s Incident Management
process.
The next steps of our demonstration are identified below:
Import the Help Desk’s activities to EAMS
20
Import the TIPA Incident Management Assessment instantiation to the
EAMS
Relate the EA elements of the IT department concerning the Incident
Management Process with the ITIL and TIPA’s instantiation of that
process
Create an application as a module of EAMS with the function of
providing a dashboard of costs, resources, time amongst other possible
features related to the current level of maturity achieved by the IT
Department regarding Incident Management.
Show our demonstration to ITIL experts and to the IT Department’s staff
and director for validation purposes.
With these features inside our EA tool, we are able to show how the EA of the IT
Department should adapt in order to become fully compliant and mature regarding
Incident Management by minimizing its efforts, time, costs and resources.
7 Evaluation
This section refers to the “Evaluation” step of the DSRM process, where we will do
an evaluation of our proposal. Besides the Demonstration as the primary source of
evaluation of our work, we will consider another three steps in our evaluation. For
evaluating our TIPA metamodel we will use the Wand and Weber [28] ontological
analysis method to evaluate our concept mappings from TIPA to ArchiMate.
Afterwards, we will use the Moody and Shanks Framework [10] to evaluate the
quality of our model.
Later on, we will interview stakeholders from ITIL experts to the director and
employees from the IT Department at Santa Maria Hospital in order to validate the
correctness and the utility of our proposal to the scientific and organizational
community. Those interviews will also serve as input for the Moody and Shanks
evaluation. Finally, we will submit a paper on the subject to an international
conference or journals for peer review. The submission of papers is described in the
Communication section.
7.1 Demonstration Evaluation
The main evaluation source of our research work will be its practical demonstration as
described in section 6. The way we plan to demonstrate our proposal will already take
into consideration its utility, value and correctness. Moreover, our demonstration is
also planned to be an important part of our future interviews with experts in ITIL,
Maturity Models, EA and the Hospital Santa Maria IT Department staff and board.
Therefore, by showing our proposal demonstration to these experts and stakeholders,
we are also guaranteeing the validation of the correctness and value of our proposal to
both the scientific community and the organizational community.
21
7.2 Interviews
Interviews allow asking questions that are open-ended and explore emotions,
experiences or feelings that cannot easily be observed or described via pre-defined
questionnaire responses [29]. So, we will use this method for distinct stakeholders of
the several research areas of our work in order to validate the value and correctness of
our proposal. Furthermore, one of the purposes of these interviews besides the
scientific and organizational recognition is using the Moody and Shanks criteria
(described in section 7.4) as foundations of those interviews in order to classify our
work according to those respective criteria. Our interviews will mainly focus ITIL and
TIPA experts and also the staff and board from the Hospital Santa Maria IT
Department. We will then consider if time allows, interviewing other organizations
focused on IT and services in order to collect more data and feedback to help
consolidate the overall evaluation of our proposal.
7.3 Wand and Weber Method
For evaluation of the concept mapping from TIPA concepts to ArchiMate’s ones we
will perform an analysis based on the Wand and Weber ontological evaluation of
grammars method where we will try and identify four ontological deficiencies in the
comparisons of the two sets of concepts from the two universes: TIPA and
ArchiMate.
Incompleteness: can each element from the list set to be mapped on an
element from the second? – the mapping is incomplete if it is not total.
Redundancy: are the first set elements mapped to more than a second set
element? – the mapping is redundant if it is ambiguous.
Excess: is every first set element mapped on a second one? – the
mapping is excessive if there are first set elements without a relationship.
Overload: is every first set element mapped to exactly one second set
element? – the mapping is overloaded if any second set element has more
than one mapping to a first set one.
7.4 Moody and Shanks Framework
For evaluation of our TIPA metamodel we will use the The Moody and Shanks
Framework [10] for model quality management which proposes the following quality
factors:
Completeness refers to whether the model contains all user
requirements;
Integrity definition of business rules or constraints from the user
requirements to guarantee model integrity;
22
Flexibility is defined as the ease with which the model can reflect
changes in requirements without changing the model itself;
Understandability the ease with which the concepts and structures in the
model can be understood;
Correctness is defined as whether the model is valid (i.e. conforms to the
rules of the modeling technique). This includes diagramming
conventions, naming rules, definition rules, and rules of composition and
normalization;
Simplicity means that the model contains the minimum possible
constructs;
Integration is related to the consistency of the models within the rest of
the organization;
Implementability is defined as the ease with which the model can be
implemented within the project time, budget and technology constraints.
8 Communication
This section describes the “Communication” step of the DSRM process, where we
will communicate our proposal, its demonstration and evaluation. Therefore, besides
this thesis, we will submit articles to international conferences and journals where our
work will be subjected to peer evaluation and feedback. We are going to write a paper
about our proposal (TIPA Metamodel in ArchiMate) and we are also considering
writing two more papers: one about Maturity Models Modelling in ArchiMate and the
other about the practical demonstration of our proposal in the IT Department. These
two are restricted to our available time and will be more seriously considered due the
end of April.
9 Conclusion
In this thesis’s project, we propose to model an ITIL maturity model in ArchiMate for
implementing ITIL inside organizations. The purpose is of representing maturity
levels directly in the organization’s EA and by doing so, helping organizations to
achieve full compliance with ITIL by implementing it will less effort, time, costs and
resources. Obtaining that compliance with ITIL will provide these organizations with
a full maturity, effectiveness and efficiency of their business processes. With this
proposal we expect organizations can realize how important and useful ITIL is in
achieving organizational excellence.
To achieve this, we have already produced the following work:
Migration of Vicente’s work regarding ITIL representation in ArchiMate
to the EAMS tool
23
Survey of Santa Maria Hospital IT Departments’ EA and respective
migration of the application and infrastructure elements to the EAMS
tool
To communicate our work, once we have defined our ArchiMate model of TIPA, we
will write and submit at least one paper about the subject on an international
conference and/or scientific journal.
On the Appendix A – Thesis Plan section, we present a gantt chart with the remaining
activities scheduled in time.
All things considered, we live in an organizational world where costs, revenues and
value generation are the most important drivers in turning organizations more
effective, efficient and mature. ITIL maturity models tell the organizations how to get
there, and by connecting this framework to their EA, we hope to ease the process of
ITIL implementation and help these organizations in achieving the desired maturity,
efficiency and effectiveness with less costs, time, effort and resources.
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Appendix A – Thesis Plan
For future work, we will start by identifying and formalizing all of the TIPA concepts.
Then, we shall map all those concepts with the respective ArchiMate concepts as well
as the respective relations amongst them. Afterwards, we conclude the design of our
proposal will the definition of our TIPA metamodel in the ArchiMate language.
For the demonstration phase we shall start by importing the remaining EA
elements (the IT Department’s Help Desk activities) into EAMS. Later on, we will
define and import a model of the TIPA’s Incident Management Assessment based on
our TIPA metamodel into EAMS and establish all the important relations between
that model, Vicente’s model of the ITIL Incident Management and the IT
Department’s EA elements. We will finish our demonstration phase with the
implementation of an EAMS module that will include a dashboard concerning all the
relevant data to simulate all the assessment process.
After finishing our demonstration we will begin with the evaluation of our
proposal. We will start with interviews to show our demonstration as well as
guaranteeing the correctness, utility and value of our work. We shall use the Wand
and Weber mapping evaluation as well as the Moody and Shanks framework to
validate our model and we shall finish this phase with the writing of papers for
scientific community review. Fig. 11 illustrates our thesis schedule.
27
Fig. 11. Thesis Schedule
28
Appendix B
The next figure illustrates the EAMS blueprint interface with an instantiation of the
ITIL Incident Management Motivation overview in ArchiMate created by Vicente [1]
Fig. 12. ITIL Incident Management Motivation
29
The next figure shows the EAMS data interface with some of the Hospital Santa
Maria IT Department’s Software Applications.
Fig. 13. HSM IT Department’s Software Applications
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