ChangeRefinery: Assisted Refinement of High-Level IT Change Requests

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices that are widely accepted for IT service management. Change management is a core ITIL process that oversees the handling of IT changes and ensures that all change requests are carefully prioritized and authorized, that business and technical impacts are understood, and that required resources are available. During this process, IT operations teams first need to understand the change requests that are generated by business and IT personnel. They must then develop and execute concrete IT change plans for each request. The increasingly large and complex IT environment (people, technology and processes) presents a number of challenges to the efficient and effective design of the ever higher volume of IT changes: Change requests can be ill-defined, company policies and best practices are not systematically captured and enforced, manually designing changes is time consuming and error-prone. To overcome these issues we propose in this paper an automated planning based approach to change design. We illustrate how change knowledge can be represented to encode best practices and how to refine high-level change requests into concrete plans. A prototypical implementation shows the feasibility of the approach and demonstrates the concept of a change catalogue that can be presented to business users.