Knowledge Management and Computational Intelligence concepts for organization of IT Infrastructure

Managing IT infrastructure in larger organizations is consisting of a multitude of single knowledge intensive processes. In this field possibilities exist for supporting these processes by knowledge management concepts and computational intelligence methods. We are investigating which concrete methods can be applied to certain issues in IT Management. For this, first of all, an extensive modeling phase is always required. As an orientation for structuring IT processes, we are using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is the de-facto standard for IT Service Management, which is about a more service-oriented working IT department. In this respect, our research also deals with the support of IT Service Management by Knowledge Management.

IT Management is not only about keeping IT running and therewith administration and maintenance of hardware and software. It is also about executing complex IT projects by which new strategic plans should be realized. Particularly in this area we are seeing great potentials for knowledge management systems and computational intelligence methods in supporting evaluation and execution of projects. At this point, intersections exist with project portfolio and application portfolio management.

Specific aspects of IT Management are analyzed in detail. Especially the topic areas “Enterprise Application Integration” and “Service-Oriented Architectures” are offering interesting perspectives for a deeper analysis. Since applications are now composed of hundreds or thousands of single services, a thorough knowledge about the services and the interconnections is required for managing the application landscape properly.

In the context of knowledge management, these topic areas can also be examined from another point of view. Since knowledge management systems need data from different (application)sources, methods are required by which an easy access to this data is possible. The question which needs to be answered is how knowledge management systems can be optimally integrated into the existing (highly integrated) application landscape. However, this is mainly about technical problems which need to be solved.

 

Within the great research area “Knowledge Management and Computational Intelligence for Organization of IT Infrastructure” we have set a focus on following specific areas of research:

• Knowledge Management and Computational Intelligence for support of IT Project Portfolio Management.
• Knowledge Management and Computational Intelligence for optimizing the application landscape
• Knowledge Intensive Processes in the IT Infrastructure Library and possibilities for knowledge management systems support.