Research On Metamodel And Customization Technology Of IT Service Support Process

Information technology has not only become the most important driving force of China's economic and social development , but also the direct driving force to transfer IT system from back-office to business field. To make IT really optimize business operations, enterprises must strengthen the capability of IT management to establish a comprehensive IT service management system and achieve product-centric to service- oriented transformation. IT Service Management (ITSM) is playing an increasing important role in ensuring consistency between information technology and business process nowadays. IT Service Support is an important part of ITSM. It provides IT governance with standard and disciplines, which ensures better IT technique support for enterprises business functions. However, challenges still remains as follows: Firstly, it is difficult to understand the core concepts of IT Service Support process clearly and systematically. Secondly, integration, exchange, reuse of metamodel-based process models of different modeling languages is not available. Thirdly, current solutions do not support customization well to fulfill the specific requirements of enterprises of any scale and type. Fourthly, current solutions do not support dynamic IT Service Support process modeling according to the requirement change of the enterprises. Faced with these challenges, an IT Service Support process metamodel was presented in this paper. The metamodel is based on ITIL and described by MOF. On the base of the metamodel, we make a research on customization and develop a platform.The paper first analyze the of IT Service Support domain and define the domain model. Then the paper makes comparison between various business process metamodels and chooses Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) as an appropriate one. The paper extends BPDM and includes the domain features of IT Service Support processes to build the metamodel. The paper also focuses on dynamic process modeling techniques in studying the dynamic and flexible characteristics of domestic small and medium enterprises. We first extract the basic processes from IT Service Support processes, and then we identify the dynamic points of IT Service Support processes and design the ECA-based IT Service Support rule. Though the rule customization, we realize the online customization of the process rule. The paper also uses name-value method to implement the data online customization and further improve the flexibility of the IT Service Support processes.The metamodel has characteristic of easy operation and simple structure, and it has been preliminary applied in implementation of IT Service Support Process tool– EITSSP. EITSSP is developed for domestic middle and small companies. The metamodel soundly support the process modeling and rule customization. The rule in ECA form realizes the dynamic process management which means companies can easily adapt the process to their specific requirement with the help of tool.EITSSP has been deployed in three enterprises for pilot run. The result shows that the customization of both process and data in the platform can help enterprises to manage and automate tasks in IT service support process effectively.With regard to the related works, the innovation of the paper lays on:1) Researching and proposing an IT Service Support process metamodel. The metamodel provide a sound base for process definition, reuse, exchange, integration and automation.2) Proposing the ECA rule-based rule customization to meet the various requirements IT Service Support processes in enterprises of all sizes and types. We use AOP technology to implement the rule engine light-weightily.3) Developing EITSSP Platform on the basis of metamodel and customization technology. Compared with current IT Service Support tools, our platform performs better in realizing the flexible process management through online process rule customization.