An IT Infrastructure Patterns Approach to Improve IT Service Management Quality

IT services are built on top and are delivered by (and therefore depend upon) IT infrastructures. The design of the latter is critical, since it will influence the overall quality of IT services. However, designing IT infrastructures for large organizations is a challenge task since it requires knowledge of existing organization processes, the views of different players, and the conjunction of technical expertise in different domains, that rarely reside in a single individual. To improve the design of IT infrastructures, namely by allowing to reuse proven solutions to recurrent problems we propose the use of IT infrastructure patterns. The use of patterns in the design of IT infrastructure will provide several benefits such as facilitate the communication among IT design stakeholders, simplify the whole design process and potentially decrease size and complexity, which all contribute to increase the quality of IT service management processes. This paper present the preliminary effort to build supplier-independent IT infrastructure patterns and we introduce two of them, covering aspects from its rationale to instantiation that will hopefully leverage the IT infrastructure design process and create a positive impact in the quality of IT service management processes trough proven and better designed IT Infrastructures.